Exploring use cases for telepresence robots

  • Authors:
  • Katherine M. Tsui;Munjal Desai;Holly A. Yanco;Chris Uhlik

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA;University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA;University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA;Google Inc, Mountain View, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Human-robot interaction
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Telepresence robots can be thought of as embodied video conferencing on wheels. Companies producing these robots imagine them being used in a wide variety of situations (e.g., ad-hoc conversations at the office, inspections and troubleshooting at factories, and patient rounds at medical facilities). In July and August 2010, we examined office-related use cases in a series of studies using two prototype robots (Anybots' QB and VGo Communications' VGo). In this paper, we present two studies: conference room meetings (n=6) and moving hallway conversations (n=24). We discuss who might benefit from using telepresence robots, in what scenarios, and the features that telepresence robots must incorporate for use in ad-hoc interactions.