University of Hertfordshire

A Visit to Robot House

We welcome viewers to virtually visit the Robot House at the University of Hertfordshire and experience what human-robot interaction research in a domestic environment can look like. You will be part of a situation where someone living in the house welcomes a friend for a cup of tea and to tour the house together. During that, you can observe, from different perspectives, how our robots use their capabilities in interaction with humans and you can learn how robots might be able to provide people with social, physical and cognitive support in their daily lives.

Meet the Team

We are a team of human-robot interaction researchers at the University of Hertfordshire’s Robot House, a unique facility to conduct research in an authentic domestic environment. The team is led by Patrick Holthaus with support of Farshid Amirabdollahian who are running and managing the facility. The demo is realised by the extended team consisting of one postdoctoral research fellow and four PhD students who are currently working on exciting projects around Robot House, covering aspects of trust in human-robot interaction, human daily activity recognition, or personalised robotics. The projects all contribute to research that revolves around social and assistive robotics where we explore how to ensure robots’ assistive potentials and its behaviour to act in a socially acceptable way to engender trust among the people that interact with them. Many of our projects are focused on investigating how robotics technologies can support independent living in later life.