Intelligent products are transforming our private households as well as our working world. With the increasing flexibility of robotic platforms, a transfer of interaction and operating concepts is now taking place in both directions. Robot vacuum cleaners are already established on the market, while smart speakers are opening up new expanded avenues of human-machine interaction in the home. Both types of product are already having a major impact on the entire "home and household" ecosystem. Larger mobile service robots with manipulative capabilities are yet to be introduced to the market, but are already being explored intensively in scenario studies and benchmarking exercises. There has been little systematic research into what impact the introduction of manipulative service robots will have on the living environment. The living environment is currently designed exclusively for human use. This applies to navigation paths or device operation as well as access to shelves, cabinets or drawers. Interfaces and operating concepts that allow the possible delegation of household tasks to a service robot relate not only to the robot itself, but also to the entire smart living environment, including furniture, household appliances, doors and household objects. The kitchen has a special pilot role here because a particularly large number of household processes are functionally anchored here and the environment already has a high degree of mechanization that must be used by both humans and service robots. Early consideration of future scenarios in this environment therefore leads to significant competitive advantages in this market segment. At the same time, robustness requirements in everyday life and newly learned interaction patterns there are an innovation driver for human-machine interaction in the working world.

Blog posts

06/06/2023 |  Hybrid Living: Robot Assists in the Kitchen  



The "Hybrid Living" project explores interaction strategies for highly flexible tasks in which an autonomous service robot supports people in their everyday lives. The project pursues an intermediate path in which humans, robots and the environment are considered together in a design process. The environment is not understood as static and passive, but is oriented towards the use by humans or robots, participates in the perception of the state of the environment and is an active participant in the interaction of an everyday task.



This type of hybrid operating concept, which considers humans and robots together with a physically and multimodally interactive environment, is the focus of the project. The loading and unloading of a dishwasher is considered as a benchmarking scenario. The project examines the reciprocal effects of the role of service robots in this task in the "kitchen" environment in terms of functionality and acceptance.