Designing interruptive behaviors of a public environmental monitoring robot

This paper reports ongoing research to inform the design of a social robot to monitor levels of pollutant gasses in the air. Next to licensed environmental agents and immobile chemical sensors, mobile technologies such as robotic agents are needed to collect complaints and smell descriptions from humans in urban industrial areas. These robots will interact with members of the public and ensure responsiveness and accuracy of responses. For robots to be accepted as representative environmental monitoring agents and for people to comply with robot instructions in the case of a calamity, social skills will be important. In this paper we will describe the intelligent environment the environmental robot is part of and discuss preliminary work to understand in what way robot interruptions can be mitigated with help of social robot behaviors.