OfficeMate: Pilot Evaluation of an Office Assistant Robot
Jiahe Pan, Sarah Schömbs, Yan Zhang, Ramtin Tabatabaei, Muhammad Bilal, and Wafa Johal · ACM/IEEE HRI 2025
About the project
OfficeMate is a social office assistant built on the TIAGo mobile robot using ROS. It combines GPT-4-assisted conversation with predefined action triggers, person-following, autonomous navigation, and custom gestures. Activities include snack handovers, breathing exercises, and stress-ball catch; a calendar interface supports meeting scheduling and reminders.
Pilot evaluation
Seven participants tried OfficeMate in a university office and completed semi-structured interviews. They saw potential for companionship and support for healthy habits, while raising concerns about privacy, noise, speech responsiveness, movement predictability, and the timing of interruptions. These exploratory findings identify design priorities for office integration; they do not establish improvements in well-being or productivity.
Related demonstration work
I demonstrated an office assistant robot on Tiago, with autonomous navigation and interaction, during a post-HRI academic visit in March 2025.