Shaping Human-Robot-Public Interaction in a Smart City Robot Competition

Carlos Cuevas-Garcia and myself have a chapter in Florian Muhle and Indra Bock’s book: Communicative AI in (Inter-)Action. It’s about what happened when Carlos and myself spent a week watching a ‘smart city robot comptition’ take place in Milton Keynes’ biggest mall.

Abstract

This chapter presents a situational analysis of SciRoc, the first ever “Smart city Robots competition”, organized by the European Robotics League (ERL) in partnership with Milton Keynes City Council in the United Kingdom and a number of academic and commercial sponsors. Besides this competition, we use data collected during other ERL competitions in test beds and living labs in Madrid, Oldenburg, Bristol, mainstream media reporting and extensive conversations with participants. We argue that since competitions are constituted by different sets of rules, and since these rules intersect with the values, practices, assumptions, politics, and interests of their sponsors and organizers, they are appropriate sites for studying the institutional shaping of human-robot-public interaction. We identified three modes of human-robot-public engagement: embracing engagement, an open and attentive form of engagement that was sensitive to the needs, interests, and concerns of various participants, sponsors, and members of the audience. Second, bypassing engagement, a more constrained and constraining form of engagement that limited the possibilities of mutual understanding between competition participants and the various publics. Third, prefiguring engagement, a variety of previous commitments and expectations that brought the event into being and gave it shape, but that rigidly framed the ways in which publics and participants could engage with each other. These three modes of engagement in turn revealed and were shaped by different logics of social ordering, namely conviviality, control, and care.

Citation

Cuevas-Garcia, C., & O’Donovan, C. (2024). Programming Engagement: Shaping Human-Robot-Public Interaction in a Smart City Robot Competition. In F. Muhle & I. Bock (Eds.), Communicative AI in (Inter-)Action: Investigating Human-Machine Encounters outside the Laboratory (pp. 27–54). Bielefeld University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839475010-002