LIVING AND WORKING WITH ROBOTS

Living and Working with Robots (LWR) is an interdisciplinary research ‘collaboratory’ that is part of the University of Texas at Austin’s Good Systems, a grand challenge dedicated to the development of ethical AI. Our collaboratory brings together thirteen researchers from Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, English, Communication Studies, Robotics, and the School of Information to build services robots in the communities where they will be used, rather than just in academic in industry labs. As part of this team, I co-lead a set of projects to better understand the users of (near-future) domestic service robots.

C3Po by Lyman Hansel Gerona via Unsplash

Stop-Gap Labor

Read our article in the proceeding of Human-Robot Interaction. It was awarded Best Paper in the subfield of Design.

When robot designers are presented with evidence that many autonomous systems actually require human intervention to operate effectively, they often respond that this labor is just a “stop gap” — a temporary fix to the technology’s current limitations that will eventually be eliminated with future improvements. This article brings together interviews and observations from three robot deployment sites to highlight the persistent necessity for human work in manufacturing and service industries.

Community-Embedded Robotics

Image by Sarah Kaye Stephens

A spin-off team from LWR received a National Science Foundation Growing Convergence Grant to study how robots interact with changing groups of people in real-world environments — with the goal of widening the scope of delivery robotics research to include the communities they impact and co-evolve with. I was Senior Personnel on this project and helped the team to listen to, value and leverage public responses to pilot deployments as part of the design process.

The grant award received coverage in USA Today and KVUE news. It was also a feature article in Texas Monthly, “It’s Okay to Fear the Robot Dogs Coming to UT.”