Alicia Schildhauer, "Human-robot cooperation for solving a manipulation task in the context of outpatient elderly care ", Berliner Hochschule für Technik, 2021.

Technology for elderly care is becoming increasingly important due to the rising number of people turning old and at the same time the number of care workers decreasing. This bachelor’s thesis gives an introductory investigation on a future in elderly-robot cooperation. A focus is set on the selection and evaluation of different possible interaction tasks. Also, the relevance of various interaction modes is taken into account, to discover, which interaction modality should be used as a starting point for an easy interaction experience. Interacting through gaze is explored as being the most rudimentary and therefore most simple modality. The interactive scenario is selected based on needs and wishes, expressed explicitly by el- derly people, care giver and future elderly during an interview study, which was conducted previously to this work. Hence, this thesis follows an user oriented approach by taking the interview study as a starting point for further development. Based on that, essential characteristics are extracted and used to choose a task for this thesis project. The tasks of unscrewing a container and pouring a drink from a bottle into a glass are implemented using simulation and a robotic platform. Insights about the perception of the interaction between robot and human are extracted from an user experiment with N=6 participants. During the experiments, it is observed, how intuitive and easy the interaction is for the participants. By being able to provoke the start of the task execution, the participants show, that they are able to use their existing knowledge to successfully interact with the robot and achieve their goal. The result is, a system using simple gaze cues and hand signs can be rated easy to interact with.