Negotiating the Real World of Domestic Service Robotics

Paper Title

Negotiating the Real World of Domestic Service Robotics

Publication Info

• Topic area: The negotiation of values in the design and evaluation of domestic service robotics through the RoboCup@Home competition.
• Keywords: Domestic service robotics, RoboCup@Home, values negotiation, feasibility, fairness, naturalness, human-robot interaction, competition design, sociotechnical systems, rule-making.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Domestic service robots remain limited in their ability to operate under diverse real-world conditions and perform complex household tasks. Competitions like RoboCup@Home aim to advance the field but face challenges in balancing technical feasibility, fairness, and realism in task design.
• Significance: Understanding how values are negotiated in these competitions is crucial for shaping the future of robotics and ensuring that robots are designed to meet real-world needs effectively.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in CSCW, STS, and HRI has explored how values influence technology design, but there is limited understanding of how these values are negotiated in collaborative settings like robotics competitions. This paper builds on these foundations to analyze the negotiation of values in RoboCup@Home.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A socio-technical grounded theory (STGT) analysis of RoboCup@Home’s rule-making process, focusing on the negotiation of values and antivalues in the competition’s design.
• Novelty:
  1. Identification of key value-antivalue pairs (e.g., in/feasibility, un/fairness, un/naturalness) that shape deliberations in RoboCup@Home.
  2. Analysis of how these values influence the design of tasks, rules, and evaluation criteria in the competition.
  3. Exploration of how logistical and technical infeasibility limits the realization of shared values.
  4. Examination of the competition as a site for rendering the "real world" as a resource for domestic service robotics.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Analysis of 680 GitHub Issues and Pull Requests from 2015–2023, focusing on deliberations leading to the 2022 and 2023 competitions.
  • Ethnographic fieldwork at the 2023 RoboCup@Home event.
  • Application of STGT to identify and analyze patterns of value negotiation in the data.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Three key value-antivalue pairs were identified: in/feasibility, un/fairness, and un/naturalness.
  • The antivalue of infeasibility (technical and logistical) was the strongest limiting factor in adopting rule changes that could enhance realism, fairness, and naturalness.
  • Proposals rejected as infeasible included incorporating more naive operators, varying task timings, and requiring human-robot interaction in all tasks.
• Advantage over baselines: The study provides a nuanced understanding of how values are negotiated in collaborative settings, highlighting the trade-offs and constraints that shape the design of domestic robotics competitions.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Data from GitHub discussions, meeting notes, and rulebook revisions were analyzed to trace the invocation of values and their impact on decision-making.
  • Ethnographic insights were used to contextualize the findings and validate interpretations.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The study primarily focused on digital deliberations and did not extensively analyze team preparation or on-site competition dynamics.
  • Future work should explore benchmarking practices, the dynamics of im/possibility in robotics design, and the broader implications of value negotiation in technology development.

Summary

This paper investigates how values such as feasibility, fairness, and naturalness are negotiated in the design of RoboCup@Home, the largest domestic service robotics competition. Using socio-technical grounded theory, the study identifies key value-antivalue pairs and highlights how logistical and technical infeasibility constrain the realization of shared values. The findings reveal the competition’s dual role in shaping domestic service robotics and rendering the "real world" as a resource for the field. Future work should address the broader implications of these negotiations for robotics design and explore interventions to better align competition design with real-world needs.