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Development of a Socially Believable Multi-Robot Solution from Town to Home

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Abstract

Technological advances in the robotic and ICT fields represent an effective solution to address specific societal problems to support ageing and independent life. One of the key factors for these technologies is that they have to be socially acceptable and believable to the end-users. This paper aimed to present some technological aspects that have been faced to develop the Robot-Era system, a multi-robotic system that is able to act in a socially believable way in the environments daily inhabited by humans, such as urban areas, buildings and homes. In particular, this paper focuses on two services—shopping delivery and garbage collection—showing preliminary results on experiments conducted with 35 elderly people. The analysis adopts an end-user-oriented perspective, considering some of the main attributes of acceptability: usability, attitude, anxiety, trust and quality of life.

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Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement No. 288899 (Robot-Era Project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy

    Filippo Cavallo, Raffaele Limosani, Alessandro Manzi, Manuele Bonaccorsi, Raffaele Esposito & Paolo Dario

  2. Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS), Orebro University, Örebro, Sweden

    Maurizio Di Rocco, Federico Pecora & Alessandro Saffiotti

  3. Robotech Srl, Peccioli, Italy

    Giancarlo Teti

Authors
  1. Filippo Cavallo
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  2. Raffaele Limosani
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  3. Alessandro Manzi
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  4. Manuele Bonaccorsi
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  5. Raffaele Esposito
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  6. Maurizio Di Rocco
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  7. Federico Pecora
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  8. Giancarlo Teti
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  9. Alessandro Saffiotti
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  10. Paolo Dario
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Correspondence to Filippo Cavallo.

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Cavallo, F., Limosani, R., Manzi, A. et al. Development of a Socially Believable Multi-Robot Solution from Town to Home. Cogn Comput 6, 954–967 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-014-9290-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-014-9290-z

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