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Designing Robotic Intention Visualisation (Master of Philosophy)
People effectively coordinate (co-located) teamwork through various social approaches that make team members aware of what they are doing or intend to do. Collaborative robots (cobots) are being introduced to the workplace to enable tight integration of human and robotic work activities, such as assisting human workers with repetitive or strenuous physical tasks. But robots may behave autonomously or semi-autonomously, and this necessitates communication about the robot’s intentions.
Introducing complex, tightly integrated tools such as cobots not only raises questions about how to support work routines effectively but, more so, how to support the coordination of these work routines in mixed teams of humans and robots.
Research activities
This MPhil project explores how to support tightly integrated co-located work between humans and robots through intention visualisation and notification. Research activities include designing and researching interaction approaches and modalities that display relevant information such as routes, planned actions, task status and safety warnings from a robot to co-located human operators.
This project will follow a co-design approach and engage users and industry stakeholders in an iterative design process involving low and medium-fidelity prototypes to rapidly explore modalities and interaction approaches.
Skills and Experience
This MPhil is situated at the intersection of Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction and Human-Robot Interaction.
You should have a detailed understanding of:
- co-design approaches
- iterative design.
It desirable that you have experience with:
- physical prototyping
- physical computing
- augmented reality
- mixed reality.
Previous experience in working with collaborative robotic systems is not critical but beneficial.
Principal Supervisor: Prof Markus Rittenbruch
Associated Researchers