Encountering Autonomous Robots in Public Streets

Robots deployed in public settings enter spaces that humans live and work in. Understandings of robots, such as those in HRI and beyond, tend to prioritise direct, obvious and deliberate interactions with robots. Yet this fails to identify the most common form of mundane, everyday response to robots in public, which ranges from the unobvious and subtle to virtually ignoring them. Drawing on a collection of video recordings, we show how public delivery robots encounter the lived-in spaces of urban streets both from a perspective of the social assembly of the physical environment and the socially organised nature of everyday street life that such robots are entering. Ultimately we show how such robots are effectively `granted passage' through these spaces as a result of the mundane, practical work of the streets' human inhabitants. We demonstrate the importance of studying robots during their whole deployment, in the spaces that they enter, and challenge the current understanding of what `counts' as human-robot interaction, highlighting that we may want to re-think who we consider as `user' as well as the conceptualisation of human-robot interaction itself.