Understanding Robot Autonomy in Public
by Dr Stuart Reeves, University of Nottingham
In our RAi UK International Partnerships project “Understanding Robot Autonomy in Public” we have had the opportunity to spend time understanding what people do on urban streets when robot delivery services are operating in their midst. While previous work has tended to look at the more extreme and obvious media-friendly moments which result – such as people helping robots in the snow, or at the other end of the scale, vandalising them – we instead chose to focus on the more mundane and ‘taken for granted’ encounters between people on the street and these new entrants to our urban spaces.
Our study approach has involved spending time visiting the places where robot services are provided, making sense of those places simultaneously as quotidian ‘normality’ yet also as sites of system deployment for technologists. We have managed this duality in our fieldwork, conducting video ethnography within many locations. The approach has helped us as investigators encounter and - more important – centre the mundane experiences of individuals and groups of pedestrians, shop keepers, families, people pushing buggies, people on mobility scooters, window cleaners, cyclists, car or van drivers, and so on. The diversity of members of the street we encounter in doing this, and the sheer variety of their activities, tends to be underrepresented within existing research on public robots. As such our approach can provide a novel kind of input to RRI-oriented HRI design processes by including the material activities of people in such familiar-yet-overlooked scenes in public.
Armed with a better understanding of how people respond to and accommodate robots in public, in the final phase of our project we have leveraged our existing work with our partners to turn back towards Sweden, where we have follow-on funding from the Swedish innovation agency, Vinnova, to study the new rollout of delivery robots in Stockholm – giving us the opportunity to compare and contrast the UK experience with the Swedish one.