About

About us

HISTORY OF THE ROBOT BEHAVIOR PATTERNS

How can we establish a shared “interaction language” for robots – independent of morphology and context of use?

Robot Behavior Patterns as part of the NIKA project 

The NIKA project was established in 2018 to explore ways to improve human-robot interaction, with the goal to make everyday communication with social robots pleasant and easy to understand. We quickly discovered that each robot shows different behavior during the interaction and users have to get used to new interaction strategies every time they encounter a new robot. Therefore, we started to look for a way to create standard interaction strategies for social robots, that can be used by robots of different morphologies and in different application areas – the idea for the Robot Behavior Pattern Wiki was born!  

Based on empirical studies and an extensive review of existing research and design practices, we developed design recommendations for expressive robot behaviors and documented them as Patterns to make them easier for you to access and use for your own robot interaction design.  

Let’s unite and design social robots together that people love to interact with!

Pattern Developement Process

From Use Cases to reusable robot behaviors in three steps

ANALYSIS

  • Identify recurring interaction steps of the robot
  • Specify communication goals

CREATION

  • Collect and review scientific insights and best practices to express the communication goal
  • Specify multimodal robot behavior

EVALUATION

  • Prototype robot behavior
  • Test with users
  • Iteratively refine robot behavior
ABOUT THE DEVELOPERS

Intuitive and Comfortable Human-Robot-Interactions

– User Experience at Fraunhofer IAO

How will people live and use technology in the future? Asking this and similar questions, researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO apply their findings in practice to achieve concrete results. Our experts shape the interaction between humans, technology and organization with a view to the whole, keeping each customer’s specific needs in mind. 

In the User Experience team, we develop new methods and approaches for  creating positive interaction experiences with technology. In the NIKA project, we developed visions how people will interact with robots in the future. The Robot Behavior Pattern Wiki was build to share our knowledge with you and help to shape the development of pleasant, comprehensible and acceptable social robots. Let’s start the next chapter of human-robot interaction now – and use patterns! 

NIKA project team

– from Fraunhofer IAO

Kathrin Pollman

Kathrin Pollmann

Nora Fronemann

Daniel Ziegler

Daniel Ziegler

CONTACT

Get in touch

If you’ve got questions about our patterns – feel free to contact us!

We are also curious to know how you used the patterns and happy to receive your suggestions for new patterns.