Community-Robot Interactions by Swapna Joshi

You must have heard -  Robots are here to make your life easier. Delivery robots are rushing thr67k,m ough your neighborhood to get that pizza to you… Educational robots are helping your children grow smarter in their school. Pet robots are giving care and companionship to your grandparent in some care facility. These robots are here to help your neighborhood, schools, and care communities grow stronger.  That doesn’t make sense……. 

Robots are still being designed only to cater to individual and personal needs. We haven’t figured out how social robots can help us build community connections, or encourage us to participate in communal activities.

My dissertation calls for a shift to a community-oriented perspective on study and use of robots. For the past seven years, I have been on a quest to find aspects and feelings of community in our real-world interactions with robots. 

I found that, like me, others too can think of robots as shared and communal technology. My first participants, members of a  retirement community could imagine robots in all sorts of shared and communal roles,  enabling social connections, leading and facilitating meetings, and even encouraging participation in events.

You might think these were just imagined roles, right? So.. working alongside an intergenerational community, right here in our town, I tested if robots could support a community initiative. I observed how using robots led to an increase in interactions between elders and children, but most importantly I saw how these robots couldn’t succeed in this job without first getting help and support from the community members and in the process creating even more community interactions.

Now you will say this was planned research… not the real world, right? But, a few months later, this community bought several pet robots for their own use. Robots have now become members of this community, navigating through its social structure and shaping its everyday practices. At times these robots encourage and support playful activities, and at other times they demand for attention and receive care from community members.

So robots can integrate in our communities. You might question, if can they build communities? Well, last year, when the world was dealing with the pandemic, some social robot owners in Japan found comfort in sharing Tweets with each other about their day to day life with their own robots - leading to building of a community around their use of robots. Members of this community have their own slang language to talk about their robots. They share tips and ideas and exchange clothing,  accessories and food they make for their robots.

My systematic presentation of all of these first real-world cases would provide a starting point for studying and designing robots as community technology and to critically think about how robots can affect our community-level goals and values.  Do you agree?