What do we do?
In the Human-Centered Robotics Lab as a part of the Human-Centered Engineering Hub at Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences in Wolfenbuettel, Germany, we work on architectures, development and evaluation of robotic systems, specifially in social, health and cultural contexts as well as in special applications like environment-supporting robotics.
Research Goals
Our main research target is understanding user (re-)actions, proactively work with users to encounter their reservations towards robots and ensuring highest-possible usability of our systems. We evaluate solutions developed for this purpose with user acceptance as a target variable, because:
a system that users do not want to use in everyday life is not a satisfactory solution to their problems.
To develop and evaluate real robotic systems, a robot arena is available at Exer 2, Room 162 for various scenarios and equipped with diverse robots.
- IROS 2025 conference presentation
Our paper S. Kachavarapu, T. Doernbach, T. Gerndt: Fast-Revisit Coverage Path Planning for Autonomous Mobile Patrol Robots Using Long-Range Sensor Information (https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07343) has been presented successfully by Srini on the IROS 2025 conference!
The accompanying code repository is available here: https://github.com/hcr-lab/FaRe-CPP
- Best Paper Award Finalist on ICSR 2025
Our recent paper Remote vs. Presence Laboratories in Human-Robot Interaction with Social Robots: A Study on Task Performance with Chris Peters as lead author has been nominated as Best Paper Award Finalist on the 2025 International Conference on Social Robotics + AI!
- Node-(RED)² release with Temi and Sawyer support
We just released a new version of Node-(RED)² that includes support for the Temi and Sawyer robots. This allows you to build your own scenarios for heterogeneous social robots.
- RO-MAN 2025 Workshop
We are going to host a workshop at the RO-MAN 2025 conference titled Efficient Visual Programming of Multi-Robot Behavior for Untrained Users – VisProgMR. View the details here: https://visprogmr2025.hce-hub.de/ – see you at RO-MAN!
- New website
With the new Ostfalia website, we have modernized the HCE Hub website as well to reflect our newest developments and research topics.