Opening Up Human-Robot Collaboration

As we see robots being deployed into new places in everyday life, questions arise about what 'human-robot collaboration' (HRC) might look like there. At the same time, HRC researchers are looking to CSCW for better conceptualisations of 'collaboration', and recent work has called for more CSCW-oriented studies of HRC to support this. We address this via an ethnomethodological study of encounters between pedestrians and food delivery robots on public streets. Our analysis--using video recorded fragments of what happens on the streets--demonstrates how passers-by continuously manage walking trajectories in ways that account for robot actions; specifically we articulate how people accomplish practices of following and overtaking robots, passing by and crossing paths with them. We then show that the picture of human-robot collaboration is drawn with distinct asymmetries of action and intelligibility, where humans contribute considerable work to get something that looks like 'collaboration' achieved. This raises fundamental questions for how we talk about concepts of collaboration in HRC from a CSCW perspective, and how such notions can and should be applied to activities which include robots.