Intendicate – An intuitive and iconic method to indicate robotic motion

Most industrial robots convey very little to no information about their future movements. This makes fluid human-robot coordination virtually impossible and also presents a safety risk. Addressing this problem was the goal of the Intendicate project. We aimed to develop a method for robots to communicate their planned movements in an intuitively understandable way, inspired by a certain aspect of interpersonal interaction: humans track the gaze of others and thus recognise where their attention is directed. This behaviour is deeply rooted in us and happens without us having to learn it. Eye movements trigger our attention. So, the research question was: How can we transfer this aspect of natural interaction to human-robot interaction?

In collaboration with the Humboldt University of Berlin and the design agency why do birds, we researched and developed a solution that essentially consisted of a pair of highly abstracted eyes shown as an animation on a display mounted on the robot. Both the design and the animation needed to be human-like enough to trigger attention, but not so naturalistic that they would appear creepy or weird in context with the robot. Various designs were developed and tested in a series of trials. The result is a demonstrator that was able to provide a well-founded proof of concept in the final evaluation: People were able to predict the robot's movements earlier and with less effort when supported by the developed solution.