Between culture and robotics: The making of social robots

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

In this project, how social robots are designed and how such design affects people’s interaction and experience with social robots is investigated. Social robots are autonomous robots that are used around humans and that socially interact with them to help their objectives. Such robots are increasingly common in a variety of everyday settings, including nursing homes, retail stores, banks, educational settings and medicine. The social implications of their introduction, however, are still unknown. The design and interactional features of such social robots are likely to be crucial because, once implemented, the design may lock in cultural assumptions. The focus of this project is on how roboticists’ conceptualization of extant social problems and possible technological solutions, as well as their broader cultural assumptions, shape the kind of robots they make, and how this design in turn affects the interactions between humans and social robots. A better understanding of the relationship between social and cultural demands, robotics research, and its applications will contribute to knowledge on how to create social robots without inadvertently reinforcing cultural biases and imbalances across groups. Three research methods are used in this project. First, 40 open-ended interviews are conducted with a sample of cutting-edge university researchers engaged with social robotics. Data are coded for primary patterns of the relationships between roboticists’ research goals related to social problems, their cultural assumptions about the solution to such problems, and their designs of social robots. Second, ethnographic observation is conducted on the everyday research activities in a social robotics research lab, including lab meetings, design sessions, coding, and field research. Third, video recordings of robot-human interactions, taken during the roboticists’ field research, are analyzed. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.