Encouraging CUlture of REsponsible RoboticS

As social robots are expected to increasingly enter our everyday environments, it is important to ensure that robotics technologies are actually beneficial for individuals and society as a whole. From a research point of view, one possible way to achieve such a goal is to develop frameworks for ethical robot design and responsible robotics. Yet, from the roboticists’ perspective, the existing approaches and initiatives dedicated to ethics in robotics have often been considered as largely inadequate as they often cannot be easily translated into the engineering and computer science terms, and implemented into the actual robot design. Thus, the question is how to facilitate integration of ethics into the actual roboticists’ thinking and work. The aim of the project was to investigate which strategies and measures would need to be undertaken in order to facilitate the emergence of a so-called 'culture of responsible robotics' among roboticists, and a wider community of researchers and practitioners in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Being grounded in sociology, the specific objective of the project was to investigate the meaning and experience of sociality and ethics among roboticists and combine the two under the concept of 'lived ethics'. The notion of lived ethics was viewed as closely related to that of lived experience, and hence ultimately to real life.

The core of this project was empirical ethnographic fieldwork conducted between April-October 2021 in the selected Nordic countries. It involved 35 study participants recruited among the persons who design, develop, use and/or distribute social robots and other types of interactive robots. Through the means of interviews, questionnaires, document analysis and/or participant observation, the study collected and analysed textual and visual data centred around the notion of sociality and ethics as understood by the study participants in relation to their work, social robots and human social engagement with robots. The study has shown that in order to be addressed in terms of 'lived experiences', research in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and social robotics should explore the notion of human-robot 'experience' in the first place (rather than only human-robot interactions) and redefine the existing approaches towards social robots. This is because the way sociality and ethics is understood has turned to be deeply connected to much wider contexts that go beyond the culture of responsible robotics and focus on human 'everyday life' as a whole. As a result, the project has led to the development of a framework and measurements for the 'HRI of Everyday Life' that has been discussed in the following key publications and presentations:

Zawieska, K., Hannibal, G. (2023). Towards a conceptualisation and critique of everyday life in HRI. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Vol. 10.
Zawieska, K., Sorenson, J. (2023). Towards HRI of Everyday Life: Human Lived Experiences with Social Robots, Companion 18th ACM/IEEE Int. Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI2023) (short paper + accompanying research video), Mar 13-16, 2023. Stockholm, Sweden: 347-350.9.
Zawieska, K. (2022). HRI: From Interaction to (Lived) Experience, In Proceedings of Robophilosophy Conference 2022: Social Robots and Social Institution. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, Vol. 366: 353-360.
Zawieska, K. (2022). Engaging Robotics Engineers with Roboethics: Moral and Social Space and Lived Ethics Perspective. Workshop “Responsible Robotics: Robots with and for Society” at 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN2022), 29 Aug, 2022, Naples, Italy.
Special Issue 'Towards HRI of Everyday Life' launched with Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

The project has shown that in order to develop social robots that are beneficial for our society, we can no longer view research on social robots as a matter of a narrow area of research and engineering activities but we need to integrate our thinking of human social engagement with robots into much wider perspectives on the human everyday life. In particular, this project has proposed to integrate the Social Science and Humanities scholarship with Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research and by doing so conceptualise everyday life and related lived experiences as a distinct theme in HRI that is systematically studied as such. This research has also expanded the existing approaches towards social robots and roboticists' work to include also 'critique' of the everyday life. Critique as a genre would require roboticists not only to engage in a critical reading and analysis of the contemporary and future ways for people to engage with social robots but also take explicit ethical and political stands needed to achieve 'a good life' through the means of social robotics.

The potential impact of this project include helping transform research on social robots in a way that robots move away from their current status of research platforms towards becoming the actual everyday objects in people's everyday life. This will prove beneficial for both society and researchers/industry involved in the design, development and use of social robots, and open the doors for envisioning new types of human-robot futures where everyday life with social robots is a point of departure rather than than a point of arrival.

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ECURES (Encouraging CUlture of REsponsible RoboticS)

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