Design impact of acceptability and dependability in assisted living robotic applications

This paper presents the implementation and investigation of a novel user centred method, adopted to design, develop and test a personal robot system, composed of a mobile robotic platform and a smart environment, for assisting people at home. As robots need to work closely with humans, novel interactive engineering design approaches are required to develop service robots that are adherent to end users’ needs and that can be quickly employed in daily life. Particularly, this paper presents a methodology based on the simultaneous evaluation of dependability and acceptability, thus leading to an innovative approach for metrics and benchmarks that includes not only the main technical attributes of dependability, but also the parameters of acceptability, both implemented via a user-centered design and co-creative approach. Additionally, dependability and acceptability form the basis for defining standardized methodologies to test and evaluate robotic systems in dedicated experimental infrastructures (or robotic facilities), which are conceived to facilitate engineers in their studies and assessments.