Robot ergonomics: A case study of chair design for Roomba

Ergonomics is the study of designing more human-friendly products, systems or processes for human. By extending this concept to robotics field, we propose robot ergonomics which is a transdisciplinary approach that brings together roboticists, product designers, and architects to solve numerous unsettled research problems or technology bottlenecks in robotics community through designing products for robots. This paper focuses on a case study of chair design for Roomba. Seven design criteria are proposed and intensive experiments are performed to validate the criteria using 22 chairs. Based on such empirical design strategy, three generic principles (i.e., observability, accessibility, and safety) of chair design are extracted for Roomba.