Becoming in Touch with Industrial Robots through Ethnography

ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction

What is the role of touch in inviting social interaction with robots? Forms of functional haptics in collaboration and socially assistive robots for example indicate one pathway. But what of more naturalistic and affective forms of touch that are more inviting, that encourage pro-social behaviors? This is a tale of three loops. First, the haptic feedback loop, where human-human touch still remains underexplored, and where human-machine touch is produced through mechanical engineering as ‘force display’ and perceived by the user as tactile (e.g. Srinivasan and Basdogan 1997). Second, the affective feedback loop, courtesy of Höök (2008; 2009) and Dumouchel and Damiano (2017), where technical systems influence, and are influenced by, a human user corporeally. Bringing these loops together encourages interaction design to consider how touch and affect may more effectively invite a range of users to interact with social robots, and their role in the perception of Artificial Empathy (AE).

Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics

As more and more robots enter our social world, there is a strong need for further field studies of humanrobot interaction. Based on a two-year ethnographic study of the implementation of a South Korean socially assistive robot in Danish elderly care, this paper argues that empirical and ethnographic studies will enhance the understanding of the adaptation of robots in real-life settings. Furthermore, the paper emphasizes how users and the context of use matters to this adaptation, as it is shown that roboticists are unable to control how their designs are implemented and how the sociality of social robots is inscribed by its users in practice. This paper can be seen as a contribution to long-term studies of HRI. It presents the challenges of robot adaptation in practice and discusses the limitations of the present conceptual understanding of human-robot relations. The ethnographic data presented herein encourage a move away from static and linear descriptions of the implementation ...

2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2016

Although it is widely accepted that robots will be used in everyday contexts in near future, many people feel anxious and hold negative attitudes toward robots. This negative reaction might be stronger when users come into direct physical contact with them, particularly when touch is required between robots and humans, (e.g., when using robots as assistants to help elderly people at home). Intergroup contact research in social psychology has proposed various forms of contact as a means to reduce negative feelings toward outgroup members. The present study examined how Contact Type (Actual vs. Imagined) and Contact Modality (Look vs. Touch) with a NAO robot would impact attitudes toward NAO compared to a no-contact control condition. Results showed that nearly any type of contact effectively reduced negative emotions compared to the control condition. However, for participants with preexisting negative emotions toward robots, contact sometimes produced more negative attitudes. We discuss these findings and the resulting implications for future research.

Ai & Society, 2021

Profit-oriented service sectors such as tourism, hospitality, and entertainment are increasingly looking at how professional service robots can be integrated into the workplace to perform socio-cognitive tasks that were previously reserved for humans. This is a work in which social and labor sciences recognize the principle role of emotions. However, the models and narratives of emotions that drive research, design, and deployment of service robots in human–robot interaction differ considerably from how emotions are framed in the sociology of labor and feminist studies of service work. In this paper, we explore these tensions through the concepts of affective and emotional labor, and outline key insights these concepts offer for the design and evaluation of professional service robots. Taken together, an emphasis on interactionist approaches to emotions and on the demands of affective labor, leads us to argue that service employees are under-represented in existing studies in human–...

Springer, 2019

Does the robot actually look (and not just see), does the robot actually feel (and not just touch)? To experts in robotics, the conflict between "touch" and "feel" may first appear as a concern of communication, situated at a linguistic level only. However, the core of the question is rather a matter of epistemology of the discourse that invokes their own relation to natural language and rationality. To support this statement, we explore the rhetorical practices of roboticists. From a general point of view, their discourses embody two epistemological tendencies (postmodernism and reductionism) that are representative of every disciplinary field. We address the problem of these two epistemological pitfalls which need to be overcome as experts in robotics intend to guide citizens in their judgements about robots.

Consumer Culture Theory in Asia: History and Current Issues, edited by Russell Belk and Yuko Minowa. London and New York: Routledge. , 2022

Collaborations between entertainment industries and artificial intelligence researchers in Japan have since the mid-1990s produced a growing interest in modeling affect and emotion for use in mass-produced social robots. Robot producers and marketers reason that such robot companions can provide comfort, healing (iyashi), and intimacy in light of attenuating social bonds and increased socioeconomic stress characteristic of Japanese society since the collapse of the country’s bubble economy in the early 1990s. While many of these robots with so-called “artificial emotional intelligence” are equipped with rudimentary capacities to “read” predefined human emotion through such mechanisms as facial expression recognition, a new category of companion robots are more experimental. These robots do not interpret human emotion through affect-sensing software but rather invite human-robot interaction through affectively pleasing forms of haptic feedback. These new robots are called haptic creatures: robot companions designed to deliver a sense of comforting presence through a combination of animated movements and healing touch. Integrating historical analysis with ethnographic interviews with new users of these robots, and focusing in particular on the cat-like cushion robot Qoobo, this chapter argues that while companion robots are designed in part to understand specific human emotions, haptic creatures are created as experimental devices that can generate new and unexpected pleasures of affective care unique to human-robot relationships. It suggests that this distinction is critical for understanding and evaluating how corporations seek to use human-robot affect as a means to deliver care to consumers while also researching and building new markets for profit maximization.

Multimodal Technologies and Interaction

Social robots are expected gradually to be used by more and more people in a wider range of settings, domestic as well as professional. As a consequence, the features and quality requirements on human–robot interaction will increase, comprising possibilities to communicate emotions, establishing a positive user experience, e.g., using touch. In this paper, the focus is on depicting how humans, as the users of robots, experience tactile emotional communication with the Nao Robot, as well as identifying aspects affecting the experience and touch behavior. A qualitative investigation was conducted as part of a larger experiment. The major findings consist of 15 different aspects that vary along one or more dimensions and how those influence the four dimensions of user experience that are present in the study, as well as the different parts of touch behavior of conveying emotions.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

In this article we present a long-term, continuous human-robot co-habitation experiment which involved two professional artists, whose artistic work explores the boundary between science and society. The artists lived in the University of Hertfordshire Robot House full-time with various robots with different characteristics in a smart home environment. The artists immersed themselves in the robot populated living environment in order to explore and develop novel ways to interact with robots. The main research aim was to explore in a qualitative way the impact of a continuous week-long exposure to robot companions and sensor environments on humans. This work has developed an Integrative Holistic Feedback Approach (IHFA) involving knowledgeable users in the design process of appearances, functionality and interactive behaviour of robots.