Design and experiments on a personal robotic assistant

The design and development of the 'personal robot', i.e. a robot capable of living together with and assisting human beings, is perhaps the main chall enge for robotics research and technology in the third Millennium. One of t he most intriguing issues in the design of such robot is the definition and implementation of adequate schemes for human-robot interaction. In fact, a chieving this goal requires multidisciplinary efforts, and the integration of engineering analysis with psychological, anthropological, ethological an d product design considerations. in this paper, the basic concepts to he fo llowed in the design of human-robot interaction are discussed. With referen ce to a concrete example: the MOVAID personal robot for assistance to disab led and elderly people at home. The MOVAID system was designed taking into careful account as a primary design goal the need for intel action with the human user. A prototype of the MOVAID system has been developed and then s uccessfully validated with disabled end-users. The results of these tests i ndicate that a personal robot is technically feasible, and is acceptable to users in terms of helpfulness, easiness of use and pleasure of interaction .