Opening Up Human-Robot Collaboration
2025 (English)In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, ISSN 2573-0142, Vol. 9, no 7, article id CSCW459Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
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.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2025. Vol. 9, no 7, article id CSCW459
Keywords [en]
ethnomethodology, public robots, mobility, participation framework, social navigation
National Category
Computer and Information Sciences Other Humanities
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-216223DOI: 10.1145/3757640ISI: 001616778700008Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105019533144OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-216223DiVA, id: diva2:1987596
Conference
CSCW
Funder
Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society (WASP-HS), 2020.0086
Note
Funding Agencies|Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/T022493/1, EP/Y009800/1]; Wallenberg WASP-HS program [MMW 2020.0086]; Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI); Responsible AI UK [IP0053]
2025-08-062025-08-062026-06-01