A Laser Projection System for Robot Intention Communication and Human Robot Interaction

In order to deploy service robots in environments where they encounter and/or cooperate with persons, one important key factor is human acceptance. Hence, information on which upcoming actions of the robot are based has to be made transparent and understandable to the human. However, considering the restricted power resources of mobile robot platforms, systems for visualization not only have to be expressive but also energy efficient. In this paper, we applied the well-known technique of laser scanning on a mobile robot to create a novel system for intention visualization and human-robot-interaction. We conducted user tests to compare our system to a low-power consuming LED video projector solution in order to evaluate the suitability for mobile platforms and to get human impressions of both systems. We can show that the presented system is preferred by most users in a dynamic test setup on a mobile platform.