Designing Adaptive Robotic Services

Our research group is designing robotic products and services that will adapt to people’s changing behavior through repeated interactions. Through the process of creating these products and services, we have found that there are many dynamic issues to account for in the design: the behavior of customers, the capabilities of the robot, and what the robot knows about people and their preferences. Current service design blueprints are not sufficient for capturing these dynamic relationships among elements of the service. Therefore, we explored the activity of designing a dynamic robot-assisted snacking service. Based on the results of a contextual inquiry, we created a service design blueprint which incorporated three main components: a delivery robot, a website, and human assistants. Using this blueprint, we mapped out how the snacking service will evolve over time. Our contribution is an addition to the service blueprint process, which can represent services that change over time.