Design principles for robot inclusive spaces

Social and service robotics deals with robot applications in, for instance, rehabilitation and health care, logistics, search and rescue, and homecare. The civil and economic relevance of these robots is more than evident. However, in spite of the tremendous advances in artificial intelligence, control, and sensing in the past decades; social and service robots are still far away of working autonomously in dynamic human-related spaces. Given this scenario, instead of developing robots with complex skills using a full suite of sensors to solve issues appearing in a real environment, the norm in robotics, we propose an augmentative approach that aims at designing social spaces of service robots through uncomplicated actions that would enable robots to overcome their limitations, and accomplish their missions with ease. In particular, we present a set of design principles namely, observability, accessibility, manipulability, activity, and safety for urban spaces involving sociable robots living and working alongside humans. The suggested principles are defined and analyzed using as case study a commercial mobile robot platform that performs a logistics task in a Singaporean hospital