Intendicate – an intuitive and iconic method to indicate robotic motion

A major concern for safety in human-robot interaction is the fact, that the human operator oftentimes does not know what the robot is up to. With Intendicate, we want to give the robot a way to indicate its motion planning in a manner that humans can read and understand most easily. A crucial concept for safe human-human cooperation is reading intention from gaze. Based on this established mechanism, we will give the robot animated eyes that humans can read. With the gaze emulation implemented, we expect the human-robot interaction to become more intuitive, more fluent and thereby safer at higher collaboration speeds. The chair of engineering psychology will work on the robot's (non)anthropomorphic gaze and eye design and experimentally evaluate the prototypes which will be developed within the project.