From Privacy Cues to Privacy-Respecting Robots

Aufgabenstellung / Topic

Robots can protect a user’s privacy by stopping or limiting sensing and data access. However, technical protection alone does not ensure that users notice or trust what the robot is doing. Prior work has identified privacy communication patterns and elicited understandable robot expressions, but has primarily considered individual behaviors separately.

In this thesis, we aim to investigate how a robot can communicate privacy-preserving behavior coherently across a complete interaction. You will develop an interactive robot system that encounters several privacy-relevant situations and responds using different sets of expressions and behaviors. These may include awareness mechanisms, visible physical interventions, or silent privacy protection. The robot’s underlying technical privacy protection should remain comparable across conditions, while the way it communicates that protection varies.

The goal is to implement an autonomous interaction where feasible and conduct a controlled lab study. The study will examine how the robot’s communication affects whether users perceive it as privacy-respecting and whether they trust its privacy behavior. The final robot platform, interaction scenario, privacy events, and experimental conditions will be developed during the thesis.

You will:

• Perform a literature review on privacy communication, trust, and perceived privacy in human-robot interaction
• Select a robot platform and a coherent set of privacy expressions and behaviors based on prior research
• Design a complete interaction containing several privacy-relevant situations
• Implement the robot behaviors, privacy-event handling, condition logic, and study logging
• Pilot the system and refine the interaction and experimental design
• Prepare and conduct a controlled user study
• Analyze and summarize the findings in your thesis
• Have the opportunity to become a co-author on a resulting research paper; writing the paper is not required as part of the thesis

You need:

• High research interest in Human-Robot Interaction
• Strong programming skills, preferably in Python
• Experience with ROS or robot programming, or strong motivation to learn it
• Interest in study design, quantitative data analysis, and conducting in-person user studies
• Ability to work independently on an interdisciplinary technical research project
• Strong English communication skills