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 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!
- 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 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
- Autonomous Guide Dog for the Visually Impaired
We have recently been working on an assistive robot for the Visually Impaired with first experiments ongoing on the Ostfalia campus. See the video below:
- IROS 2025 conference presentation
Our paper S. Kachavarapu, T. Doernbach, R. 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 (https://www.springerprofessional.de/social-robotics-ai/51859146) 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.