Encountering Autonomous Robots on Public Streets

Pelikan, Hannah R. M.; Reeves, Stuart; Cantarutti, Marina N.

Abstract

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.

Citation

Pelikan, H. R. M., Reeves, S., & Cantarutti, M. N. (2024). Encountering Autonomous Robots on Public Streets. In HRI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (561-571). https://doi.org/10.1145/3610977.3634936

• Conference Name: 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
• Conference Location: Boulder, Colorado, USA
• Start Date: Mar 11, 2024
• End Date: Mar 14, 2024
• Acceptance Date: Nov 22, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Mar 11, 2024
• Publication Date: Mar 11, 2024
• Deposit Date: Dec 29, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 11, 2024
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 561-571
• Book Title: HRI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
• ISBN: 9798400703225
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3610977.3634936
• Keywords: Public space, urban environments, delivery robots, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, video analysis, bystander
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/29000841
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610977.3634936
• Additional Information: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution; International 4.0 License.