Expression Elicitation: How can a Robot Communicate its Privacy-Relevant States?

Aufgabenstellung / Topic

Future domestic robots will become integral parts of our homes. They will have various sensors that continuously collect data and varying locomotion and interaction capabilities, enabling them to access all rooms and physically manipulate the environment. This raises many privacy concerns. However, it remains unclear how robots can communicate their privacy-relevant state and how users perceive this in real-world settings. In this thesis, you will apply the Expression Elicitation approach to develop understandable expressions for a robot operating in a domestic environment. The goal is to enable the robot to clearly communicate its privacy-relevant state to users. Scenarios may include, for example, the robot being in the same room while the user is having a sensitive conversation, recognizing this, and deactivating its microphone.

You will:

• Review literature on robot expressiveness and privacy communication and come up with referents the robot should be able to communicate
• Follow the Expression Elicitation methodology to design expressions
• Implement software to create dynamic robot expressions for a robot
• Conduct a user study
• Analyze and summarize findings in a thesis
• (Optional) Contribute to a research publication

You need:

• Interest in Human-Robot Interaction
• Interest in Privacy
• Skills in Python programming
• (Optional) Experience with robotics platforms and ROS (Robot Operating System)
• Knowledge of study design and user evaluation

Reference Work

• An Approach to Elicit Human-Understandable Robot Expressions to Support Human-Robot Interaction
• Privacy Communication Patterns for Domestic Robots