PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

A matter of course for the researchers and developers of state-of-the-art technology for human-computer- or human-robot-interaction is to create not only systems that can precisely fulfill a certain task. They must provide a strong robustness against internal and external errors or user-dependent application errors. Especially when creating service robots for a variety of applications or robots for accompanying humans in everyday situations sufficient error robustness is crucial for acceptance by users. But experience unveils that operating such systems under real world conditions with unexperienced users is an extremely challenging task which still is not solved satisfactorily. In this paper we will present an approach for handling both internal errors and application errors within an integrated system capable of performing extended HRI on different robotic platforms and in unspecified surroundings like a real world apartment. Based on the gathered experience from user studies and evaluating integrated systems in the real world, we implemented several ways to generalize and handle unexpected situations. Adding such a kind of error awareness to HRI systems in cooperation with the interaction partner avoids to get stuck in an unexpected situation or state and handle mode confusion. Instead of shouldering the enormous effort to account for all possible problems, this paper proposes a more general solution and underpins this with findings from naive user studies. This enhancement is crucial for the development of a new generation of robots as despite diligent preparations might be made, no one can predict how an interaction with a robotic system will develop and which kind of environment it has to cope with.