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.
News
- Personalized Museum Education at National Taiwan Normal University Art Museum
We are currently experimenting with a semi-humanoid robot at the art museum of National Taiwan Normal University.
In the ongoing Symbiotic Splendor special exhibition, one of the robots of the Educational Robotics Center impersonates Japanese artisan Myōchin Muneharu as a tour guide through November 8.
This allows us to generalize our MuseumBot concept to a different setup embedded in a different culture which brings up interesting new research questions and answers. - Robot Demo Day at Wolfenbuettel Hospital
HCAT Lab (Prof. Dagmar Meyer and Faycal Nait Irahal) and HCR Lab (Prof. Tobias Doernbach) jointly presented the Navel robot to nursing staff of the local hospital.
In our collaboration with the hospital, we aim to explore use cases for such robots in clinical non-nursing/non-medical everyday situations, i.e. admitting patients to the ward, giving directions, guiding patiends or visitors and responding to simple questions.
See the Instagram reel of the Wolfenbuettel hospital: https://www.instagram.com/klinikumwf/reel/DbBM-6ICD0Y and the news item on the Ostfalia front page (in German): https://www.ostfalia.de/hochschule/nachrichten/nachricht/28-07-2026_ostfalia-roboter-am-klinikum-wolfenbuettel
- Best Social Impact Paper Award on IEEE ARSO 2026
Our recent paper Smalltalk-KG: a Knowledge Graph Construction Framework for Dialog Personalization in Human-Robot Interaction with Niklas Wils and Sergio Peral Garijo as lead authors has won the Best Social Impact Paper Award on the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impact!
- ICSR 2026 conference presentation
Our paper R. Barabas, K. M. Blum, R. Gerndt, T. Doernbach: Multi-Robot Collaboration Framework for Seamless Efficient Human-Robot-Robot Interaction Research: A Cocktail Bar Case Study has been accepted for the International Conference for Social Robotics+Art (ICSR) 2026 and will be presented in London in July by Tobi.
- Personalized Museum Education at HAUM Braunschweig
In cooperation with the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig, one of the oldest museums in Europe featuring works of Vermeer, Rembrandt and Rubens, we are going to offer personalized museum tours with a social robot this summer.
Our social robot Carl is going to be available as a tour guide in the special exhibition Cabinet of Wonders in summer, with user experience design and evaluation preceding from the launch of the exhibition on April 24.
We are also offering a talk about personalized cultural education on April 30 and special interactive tours in June, July and August (in German). Hope to see you there!
- IEEE ARSO 2026 conference presentation
Our paper N. Wils, S. Peral Garijo, K. M. Blum, R. Gerndt, T. Doernbach: Smalltalk-KG: a Knowledge Graph Construction Framework for Dialog Personalization in Human-Robot Interaction has been accepted for the IEEE International Conference for Advanced Robotics and its Social Impact (ARSO) 2026 and will be presented in Vienna in June by Niklas.
The accompanying code repository is available here: https://github.com/hcr-lab/Smalltalk-KG