Designing Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction for Social Robots in Office Environments

Social robots are becoming increasingly relevant and are expected to enter our professional lives. A key challenge lies in designing these robots to ensure their behaviors are easily and intuitively understood by the users and match their expectations. This paper focuses on the design and implementation of a multimodal interaction system for social robots in office environments. Following a user-centered design approach, we iteratively developed and evaluated a prototype through multiple user studies, addressing various office-related use cases such as welcoming arriving guests and guiding them to a room. The results provide key insights into the multimodal interaction user experience of our robot. This helped us to identify key requirements and features for natural and engaging interactions.