Kerstin Severinson Eklundh

About

Kerstin Severinson Eklundh is a pioneering researcher in human-robot interaction (HRI), with a particular focus on service robotics, spatial interaction, and user-centered design. Her work has profoundly shaped how researchers and designers think about integrating robots into everyday human environments, especially for assistive purposes. Severinson Eklundh's most influential contribution, "Investigating Spatial Relationships in Human-Robot Interaction" (2006, 235 citations), established foundational principles for understanding how physical proximity and orientation shape co-presence between humans and robots. Her long-term user study of CERO, a fetch-and-carry robot designed to assist motion-impaired individuals (107 citations), demonstrated her commitment to grounding HRI research in real-world, practical settings. She also advanced methodological innovation through her application of the Wizard-of-Oz framework to service robotics scenarios (96 citations), enabling more naturalistic early-stage dialogue testing. Beyond laboratory studies, Severinson Eklundh explored robotic telepresence as a social tool, particularly for elderly users, and examined how bystanders respond to autonomous robots in shared spaces. Her iterative, user-centered design philosophy runs throughout her body of work, consistently prioritizing accessibility, learnability, and genuine human needs. With hundreds of citations across a decade of influential research, her contributions remain essential reading for anyone entering the field of social and service robotics.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Investigating Spatial Relationships in Human-Robot Interaction

   235 citations · 2006
2. 2
   Fetch-and-carry with CERO: observations from a long-term user study with a service robot

   107 citations · 2003
3. 3
   Applying the Wizard-of-Oz framework to cooperative service discovery and configuration

   96 citations · 2005
4. 4
   Measuring the Quality of Interaction in Mobile Robotic Telepresence: A Pilot’s Perspective

   58 citations · 2012
5. 5
   User centered design for intelligent service robots

   49 citations · 2002
6. 6
   User Expectations on Human-Robot Co-operation

   41 citations · 2006
7. 7
   Bringing Together Human and Robotic Environment Representations - A Pilot Study

   40 citations · 2006
8. 8
   Designing for learnability in human-robot communication

   30 citations · 2003
9. 9
   Social robotic telepresence

   29 citations · 2011
10. 10
    To help or not to help a service robot

    24 citations · 2004

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links