Software Development for Autonomous and Social Robotics Systems

One of the core features of social robotics system is a physical interaction between humans and humanoid robots. This provides additional challenges, both from safety and usability prospectives. When dealing with human-robot interaction, human safety has the highest priority. While in industrial environment we have robot cells to protect humans, in social robotics, that we consider, physical contact is possible, as well as other interactions, with consequences that might be in psychological areas. For example, the conversation with children might have different requirements in comparison to the conversation with adults, the behavioural assumptions might be different, etc. This paper summarises the core results of a project on social robotics system, where an autonomous humanoid robot guides visitors through a lab tour. The results of our work were implemented on the humanoid PAL REEM robot. The implementation includes a web application to support the management of robot-guided tours. The application also provides recommendations for the users as well as allows for a visual analysis of historical data on the tours.