Opening Up Human-Robot Collaboration

As we see robots being deployed into new places in everyday life, questions arise about what the features of `human-robot collaboration' (HRC) might look like. Recent work anticipates the need for more CSCW-oriented studies of HRC, given the increasing adoption of CSCW concepts to HRC research. 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 street---demonstrates how passers-by manage walking trajectories in ways that account for robot actions, contributing an analysis that articulates how people accomplish practices of following and overtaking robots, passing by and crossing paths with them. We show that the picture of human-robot collaboration is drawn with `unequal' asymmetries of action and intelligibility, with humans contributing considerable work to get something that looks like collaboration achieved. This raises questions for how we talk about collaboration in HRC from a CSCW perspective, and how this notion can and should be applied to groups and teams which include robots.