Video: Trials of robots to help out in the home are underway

Welcoming a lone robot like a Roomba vacuum cleaner into your home is no challenge and becoming more common.

But researchers in the UK are thinking about the problems of accommodating a whole staff of robotic servants with different tasks, bodies and features. Controlling a varied team of them could, the British team fear, be as time-consuming and demanding as being the major-domo of a collection of human servants.

They think the answer is to give all the robots on a household staff a single artificial “personality” that jumps from one to another, giving the mistress or master of the house a single, familiar interface to interact with.

Divided attention

To test the idea, Kerstin Dautenhahn at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and her team have created an ideal robotic home in a typical British suburban semi-detached house with around ten rooms across two floors (see video).


The house has around five robots of varying shapes and sizes on the staff, as well as computer screens displaying a graphical companion called Greta, which allows the human residents a different way to interact with the robots. But such a high-tech environment might overwhelm the average person, Dautenhahn says.

“Studies show that people aren’t very good at dividing their attention among dozens of objects,” she says. “It can be confusing having various machines in your house all operating simultaneously – are they actually doing what I told them to do?”

Head butler

Dautenhahn and her team decided to simplify things by creating a single interface that acts like a head butler, accepting commands from the homeowner on behalf of all the subordinate robots and answering questions.

But if that interface was tied to one “butlerbot”, the homeowner would have to seek out that particular machine whenever they wanted their robot staff to do something. Furthermore, all the other machines in the house would be unhelpfully mute if accosted by the homeowner.

To get around that problem, the robotic “head butler” function can jump from machine to machine, so that at any point during a domestic chore the homeowner can accost and question the machine that’s in action.

Essence of robot

“If it [the “head butler” interface] reaches the limit of what it can do itself, it will move to another machine and then back to the machine near you,” explains Dautenhahn. “So, for example, it can tell you it’s been able to pick up the towels from the bathroom.”

In their initial experiments, the “head butler” resides in only one machine at a time, so just one robot is active at any given moment.

Flipping control from one robot to another is not straightforward, though. Jumping between robots with very different physical designs, and even to cellphones to allow the homeowner to take their “butlerbot” with them on holiday, creates what the team dub “format issues”.

There is also the question of what to transfer. For example, detailed knowledge of the control of the robotic vacuum cleaner doesn’t need to migrate to the dishwasher. On the other hand, it’s important to make sure that the homeowner still feels they are interacting with the same essence even if it’s moved to a very new robotic “body”.

Bipedal stance

The arrival of the personality in a new robot might be indicated by a characteristic behaviour, says Dag Syrdal, a psychologist at Hertfordshire working on the project.

For instance, if the essence normally resides in a humanoid robot but has to switch to a robotic dog, the dogbot might suggest the transition has occurred by trying to stand on two legs.

“But what I think is really important is to nurture a relationship between the user and the robotic agent,” Syrdal says. There have been studies showing how the interaction with a virtual agent is enhanced if the computer character becomes friendlier with time.

Syrdal hopes to design ways that each robot can give hints of the long-term relationship between the user and the core personality.

The Hertfordshire team’s work is part of a Europe-wide project, Living with Robots and Interactive Companions (LIREC), that aims to move robots out of the lab and into the home.