Research project Autonomous Systems and Robotics in Society
Ready for robots? The integration of robots and autonomous systems into society has impacts across scales, connecting the intimate and emotional to the regulatory and economic. We take a human-centred and movement-focused approach to this transformation.
Delivery robots make their way to the customer, interacting with pedestrians and cars. Photo: Hannah Pelikan.
It is increasingly clear that innovations in digital technology, including autonomous systems and robotics, are calling into question how boundaries and consent are understood and enacted. It is important within interpersonal human relationships, between humans and digital technologies, and in how power is distributed within society.
As an interdisciplinary national collaboration, our primary goal is to establish a human-centred and movement-focused approach for the analysis and design of human interaction with autonomous systems and robotics.
We aim to study interactions with robots as they unfold in society, and to develop social scientific methodologies for the study of autonomous systems and robotics in situ. We analyse and design human–robot interaction at three different levels, covering (1) how individual human bodies move with robots in close, intimate proximity, (2) how groups of people coordinate movement with and around robots, as well as (3) how the spread of autonomous systems impacts society, in particularly the future of work, care and labour.
We study interaction with systems that are publicly deployed (high technological readiness) and develop our own robot designs with a focus on human experience (low to mid-level technological readiness).