Opening Up Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract

As we see robots being deployed into new places in everyday life, questions arise about what ‘human-robot collaboration’ (HRC) might look like there. At the same time, HRC researchers are looking to CSCW for better conceptualisations of ‘collaboration’, and recent work has called for more CSCW-oriented studies of HRC to support this. We address this via an ethnomethodological study of encounters between pedestrians and food delivery robots on public streets. Our analysis—using video recorded fragments of what happens on the streets—demonstrates how passers-by continuously manage walking trajectories in ways that account for robot actions; specifically we articulate how people accomplish practices of following and overtaking robots, passing by and crossing paths with them. We then show that the picture of human-robot collaboration is drawn with distinct asymmetries of action and intelligibility, where humans contribute considerable work to get something that looks like ‘collaboration’ achieved. This raises fundamental questions for how we talk about concepts of collaboration in HRC from a CSCW perspective, and how such notions can and should be applied to activities which include robots.

Video fragments of encounters from the paper

Our paper features various scenes of in which people in public spaces engage with robots in practices of following and overtaking, passing by and crossing paths with them.

Below we include video of the various moments included in the paper, alongside descriptions adapted from the paper that accompany these video fragments.

Figure 2: Following and Overtaking

Figure 3: Using a ‘Bulge’ to Pass By

Figure 4: Reconfiguration by Squeezing Past a Post

Figure 5: A Close Scrape

Figure 6: Fully Yielding

Figure 7: Dealing with an Intersection