Designing Personas for Expressive Robots

Towards Happy Housework: Scenario-Based Experience Design for a Household Cleaning Robotic System

INTRODUCTION: In the interwoven trend of the experience economy and advanced information technology, user experience becomes the substantial value of an interactive system. As one of the early innovations of a smart home, the current design of household cleaning robots is still driven by technology with a focus on pragmatic quality rather than the experiential value of a robotic system.OBJECTIVES: This paper aims to uplift the design vision of a cleaning robot from an automatic household appliance towards a meaningful robotic system engaging users in happy housework.METHODS: Theoretically, experience design and scenario-based design methods were combined into a specific design framework for domestic cleaning robotic systems. Based on the user study and technology trend analysis, we first set three experience goals (immersion, trust, and inspiration) to drive the design process, then chose 3D point cloud and AI recognition as backup technologies and afterwards extracted three main design scenarios (scanning and mapping, intelligent cleaning, and live control).RESULTS: The design features multi-view switching, a combination of animation rendering and real scene, fixed-point cleaning, map management, lens control and flexible remote, and shooting modes are proposed. Seventy-one participants evaluated the concept with online AttrakDiff questionnaires. The results indicate the targeted experience is fulfilled in the design concept.CONCLUSION: By integrating experience design and scenario-based design methods with technology trend analysis, designers can envision experiential scenarios of meaningful life and potentially expand the design opportunity space of interactive systems.

How Can Autonomous Vehicles Convey Emotions to Pedestrians? A Review of Emotionally Expressive Non-Humanoid Robots

In recent years, researchers and manufacturers have started to investigate ways to enable autonomous vehicles (AVs) to interact with nearby pedestrians in compensation for the absence of human drivers. The majority of these efforts focuses on external human–machine interfaces (eHMIs), using different modalities, such as light patterns or on-road projections, to communicate the AV’s intent and awareness. In this paper, we investigate the potential role of affective interfaces to convey emotions via eHMIs. To date, little is known about the role that affective interfaces can play in supporting AV–pedestrian interaction. However, emotions have been employed in many smaller social robots, from domestic companions to outdoor aerial robots in the form of drones. To develop a foundation for affective AV–pedestrian interfaces, we reviewed the emotional expressions of non-humanoid robots in 25 articles published between 2011 and 2021. Based on findings from the review, we present a set of considerations for designing affective AV–pedestrian interfaces and highlight avenues for investigating these opportunities in future studies.