Understanding Robot Autonomy in Public

Personnel

Stuart Reeves (PI) School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, UK
Hannah Pelikan (Visiting Researcher) Department of Culture and Society, Linköping University, Sweden
VTI, Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (Partner)
Marina Cantarutti (co-author / collaborator) Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, UK

What are we trying to do?

We want to centre mundane everyday experiences of autonomous robots in public places as an inherently revealing and valuable research site that tends to be overlooked by current ways of discussing and imagining public robots and civic robotics in general. By drawing together networks and partners spanning transport, HCI, HRI, robotics, sociology and linguistics, we want to foster partnerships between existing and new collaborators to share empirical data on human-robot interactions in public, and via this jointly develop interdisciplinary insights to inform future design of responsible civic robotics with a specific focus on robots in public.

Our project has the following objectives:

• Developing and supporting a network of researchers investigating robot autonomy in public
• Constructing interdisciplinary links between sociological studies of robot autonomy in public, and partners (e.g., video-based studies of interaction, engineers, human-robot interaction researchers, etc.)
• Informing emerging frameworks underpinning concepts of civic robotics – taking into account a broad picture including regulatory, governance, and responsibility angles

Project publications, activities, and other outputs

Over the lifetime of the project we have conducted research on public robots, published empirical and design papers, engaged with external organisations, and ran events.

• PUBLIC EVENT & WORKSHOP Building Bridges for Public Robots, held at the Arbetets Museum in Norrköping, Sweden, 16th-17th June 2025.
• PUBLICATION Stuart Reeves, Hannah R. M. Pelikan, and Marina N. Cantarutti. Opening Up Human-Robot Collaboration (PDF). In Proc. CSCW 2025.
• WEBINAR Urban Robotics Foundation webinar, Jan 29th 2025 on "Exploring Human-Robot Interactions" with us and Starship Technologies' Lisa Johnson; recording below.
• PUBLICATION Hannah R. M. Pelikan, Bilge Mutlu, and Stuart Reeves. Making sense of public space for robot design (PDF, DOI). In Proc. HRI 2025. (Read more about the framework including supplementary material here.)
• PUBLICATION Hannah R. M. Pelikan, Stuart Reeves, and Marina N. Cantarutti. Encountering autonomous robots on public streets (PDF, DOI). In Proc. HRI 2024. Winner of Best Paper Award. (Read more about this paper including video figures here.)
• PUBLICATION Hannah R. M. Pelikan, Stuart Reeves, and Marina N. Cantarutti. Whose Perspective are We Studying in Ethnographic HRI? (PDF, Ethnography in HRI: Embodied, Embedded, Messy and Everyday). Workshop at HRI 2024.
• PUBLICATION Hannah R. M. Pelikan and Malte F. Jung. Designing Robot Sound-In-Interaction: The Case of Autonomous Public Transport Shuttle Buses (PDF, DOI). In Proc. HRI 2023.

   

Related Work

Other projects or initiatives (old and new) that relate to this one

• AI in the street @ University of Warwick
• Robots in Public Space @ Monash University (+ a report on a related workshop
• Experimenting with robotics as a new urban infrastructure @ University of Sheffield
• Urban Robotics Foundation who are developing ISO 4448 for public-area mobile robots (PMRs)