Behavioral Design Patterns for Social, Assistive Robots - Insights from the NIKA Research Project

Abstract

The growing body of research in human-robot interaction (HRI) is still mainly focused on technical aspects of the interaction. There are no defined guidelines that describe how social, assistive robots need to be designed to be accepted by human interaction partners. The NIKA project is aimed at developing generic design solutions for reoccurring interaction situations in HRI. The developed solutions will be documented as behavioral design patterns to make them accessible for interaction designers and software developers in the field of robotics. This paper describes the framework of the pattern language that was developed in the NIKA project and outlines the steps that are necessary to create new behavioral design patterns within this framework.