Hannah R. M. Pelikan, Stuart Reeves, and Marina M. Cantarutti. In Proc. HRI 2024
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Robots deployed in public settings enter spaces that humans live and work in. Studies of HRI in public tend to prioritise direct and deliberate interactions. Yet this misses the most common form of response to robots, which ranges from subtle fleeting interactions to virtually ignoring them. Taking an ethnomethodological approach building on video recordings, we show how robots become embedded in urban spaces both from a perspective of the social assembly of the physical environment (the streetscape) and the socially organised nature of everyday street life. We show how such robots are effectively ‘granted passage’ through these spaces as a result of the practical work of the streets’ human inhabitants. We detail the contingent nature of the streetscape, drawing attention to its various members and the accommodation work they are doing. We demonstrate the importance of studying robots during their whole deployment, and approaches that focus on members’ interactional work.
Our paper features various scenes of encounter between members of the street and delivery robots, as well as moments where robots encounter parts of the ‘streetscape’—a term we use to describe the socially-produced nature of various objects that populate the street itself.
Below we include video of the various moments included in the paper, alongside descriptions adapted from the paper that accompany these video fragments.
Fulfilling the order, the vendor first locates the specific robot—in this case it was the only one present outside a café that we ordered some coffee from. They unlock the robot’s lid, placing the order in the loading box, and arrange the contents appropriately—in this case liquids needed to be held upright. The vendor shuts the lid, steps away and indicates in the app that the order is ready to go. Subsequently, the robot begins turning and starts its journey to the order destination we specified. The public availability of delivery robot loading work is important here, as a visible extension of the vendor’s work at the café; the vendor is ‘working on’ the robot as part of their shop practice.
Once the robot has identifiably stopped (coupled with an in-app indication of the destination being met, we need to unlock via the app (with audible unlocking sound to follow), open the lid, remove the contents, shut the lid and indicate we have retrieved our order. Subsequently, the lid is audibly locked again and after a short period of time the robot moves on. Once again, the public availability of this sequence of actions with the machine is clear—interaction in this way immediately marks one out—to ‘any’ observer who has even a passing familiarity with delivery robots as a customer receiving goods.
We also observed moments when members of the street got involved physically with the robots, either in a more aggressive way such as grabbing the antenna as they passed by, or more playfully such as young children obstructing the path while exploring the ‘strange’ objects on the street.
The streets that the robots are in a sense ‘invading’ are living, working places. The streetscape as an environment is of course not lab space nor an empty space—instead we find it has many categories of objects which robots encounter and must negotiate to achieve a successful delivery. By ‘streetscape’ we thus mean ‘the street as we find it’: a space of practical contingencies that simultaneously emerge from everyday human (social) activities and gain their meaning and sense from those same activities. For instance, in the UK, a series of wheelie bins present on a street would suggest that their contents either are about to or have just been collected, i.e., that it is ‘bin day’. On the other hand, a lone bin might offer a categorical implication that bin day has already been, and an occupant of an proximate, implicated house has not been home since collection. Such categories are readily available to ‘any’ competent member of that particular community. Their situation speaks out to us of the street’s social world.
Our data shows how components of the streetscape index—or point to—a particular pattern of different dureés and on-street ‘behaviours’, whether a weekly somewhat jumbled appearance and removal (bins), or perhaps instead being in place for potentially months at a time (scaffolding) albeit see-ably temporary whilst also physically very much immov- able. These pose potential problems for robots; e.g., the scaffolding caused a 1 minute stop for the robot, while the bins caused repeated stationary periods of 30 to over 60 seconds.
In contrast, other phenomena of the streetscape may appear at first glance to be more unpredictable; they could appear and disappear at any time for a given location. This category includes parked scooters, parked cars, or construction waste temporarily deposited on the street.
While vendors work on the street to load delivery robots as part of their service, presenting a readily apprehensible visual account of their relation to robot delivery, for many others whose workplace is the street itself, delivery robots are merely passing through their workplace. Such workers are treated by robots in a similar way to other objects on the streetscape. However, this is only half the story.
Our data shows that considerable interactional work is done by other service workers, construction workers, etc. to actually embed robots into the organisation of street space.
In one instance a window cleaner spots an approaching robot, suspends their work and creates a space for a passing as the robot gets closer. But the robot does not speed up (as a competent member of the street would likely do when passing by someone), but instead seems to slow down, maybe due to the narrowed pathway. The window cleaner says “come on, then” possibly to share a moment with the filming researcher. They then say “hurry up” and give the robot a little kick, as if rushing the robot to move along.
This foot tap is interesting because it offers a physical account to us as observers about the need for accommodation work here as well. It also suggests various unfulfilled anticipations of passing ‘ability’ of the robot that were made by the cleaner during its approach.
The restaurant worker accommodates the approaching delivery robot by repositioning their trolley and delays placing a traffic cone until after the robot has passed. The worker is just placing a red cone in front of an open basement door when the robot is approaching. A colleague seems to be passing a second cone via a hatch in the ground. As the robot moves closer, the worker looks at the robot and pulls back the trolley. The robot first stops and then turns right, and the worker continues to gaze at it, adjusting his position. As the robot starts rolling forward in a rightward direction, the worker pulls the trolley closer inwards, yielding more space on the pavement. The robot first makes a brief leftward movement before finally making a larger right turn. As the robot is starting to make its way towards the trolley, the worker further adjusts and pulls the front part inwards. When the robot has moved enough to pass, the worker returns to the cones but turns their gaze back to the robot, monitoring how it moves past the trolley.
We often saw pedestrians enacting very subtle, fleeting, but fluid changes to their embodied ways of traversing the street to somehow accommodate robot behaviour. Consider [the first video below], in which a pair of pedestrians walking abreast change their trajectory as they approach the robot, lining up behind one another, moving to the outer edge by the pavement kerb and squeezing past a lamppost as the robot passes. [In the second video] a pedestrian—hemmed in between the robot and a lamppost—twists their body sideways and lifts their bag to maintain distance from the robot and post.
We also found moments in our video data where anticipation and accommodation of delivery robot mobility became problematic for members of the street. In [the video below] a person almost bumps into the robot when it brakes abruptly. We found (and experienced ourselves) many such instances during our fieldwork. This exemplifies the ways in which robot mobility can be illegible to members of the street, unaccountable to the situation (there was no street-readable obstruction here), and therefore difficult to anticipate.