Design And Study On The Human-machine Interface Of Greeting Service Robots

With the gradual maturity of robot technology and the research in its application, greeting service robots are visible on various occasions including art galleries, science and technological museums, etc. Greeting service robots, also named as guiding robots, are of the greatest demand among all kinds of robots. Taking the place of human beings, greeting service robots can be used as tour guides whose main functions are to save human resources, to draw visitors' attention and to have human-robot interaction with visitors so as to leave them more fun. Through interactions, visitors can further understand and thus recognize purposes of the tour.The focus of attention to design greeting service robots is "the human" rather than the machine. Therefore, studies on the human-machine interface designs of greeting service robots are of greater significance compared with other industrial products. When people are in contact with greeting service robots, they prefer them to be more "humane" than those machines equipped with high technologies which make the users retreat. In brief, the human-machine interface design of greeting service robots differs from industrial robots not only in their single goal of improving technologies but also in the harmonious relationship between robots and users. So for industrial designers, besides securing the good performance of greeting service robots, to perfect the human-machine interface becomes another significant goal.The thesis mainly probes into the following points:(1) To analyze common features of human-machine interfaces of greeting service robots with related theories of robots and human-machine interfaces;(2) To identify the orientation of designing greeting service robots through the analysis of the users, the functions, and the application settings;(3) To generalize ideas and methods of human-machine interfaces of greeting service robots in specified settings through a case study—the human-machine interface of the greeting service robot in Shandong Pavilion of the Shanghai World Expo;(4) To materialize the interface design in the case by putting it into practice;(5) To validate the feasibility of the interface design in the case by analyzing the site running conditions of the greeting service robot; The greeting service robots, with higher technology content, superior intelligence competence, more complicated structures and functions as well as more direct information-exchange capacity are considered to be models of special products. It is also unique in its universality of the interface and its contents as well as the complicated applications of the technology. Therefore, the studies made in this thesis have offered some significant references for designs of future human-machine interfaces of similar robots.