Robopometry: A Dimensional Framework and Design Guidelines for Professional Service Robots in Interior Built Environments

Professional service robots are being deployed into interior environments dimensioned around the human body, yet no framework relates their physical envelopes to architectural parameters. This paper introduces robopometry—the systematic study of robot dimensions in relation to the built environment—as a conceptual framework bridging construction automation, interior architecture, and human–robot coexistence and illustrates it with a source-verified dimensional characterisation of 36 commercially deployed platforms. Width ranges from 275 to 1025 mm, height from 300 to 1780 mm, and weight from 5.5 to 748 kg, the last spanning 2.13 orders of magnitude (CV=145.8%). Weight differs significantly across functional categories (Kruskal–Wallis H=12.94, p=0.012); width and height are not distinguishable at this sample size. All three parameters are positively correlated, most strongly width with weight (ρ=0.853, p<0.001). A common deployment zone (CDZ) spans 384–630 mm in width and 1046–1520 mm in height. It was derived by density-based clustering and confirmed by an independently fitted Gaussian mixture with identical membership. The zone contains 47% of the sample, with a width CV of 12.2% against 30.9% for the sample as a whole. Its upper width bound is invariant across the clustering parameters tested and under leave-one-out resampling. However, the zone is not recovered when hospitality delivery platforms are excluded, as they supply ten of its seventeen members. Fourteen candidate platforms were excluded because they failed the screening criteria or because no verifiable dimensional specification is published—a reporting gap that is itself an obstacle to robot-inclusive design. Sixteen design guidelines are proposed on the basis of the CDZ envelope and are compared against documented deployment conflicts reported in the literature.