Becoming in Touch with Industrial Robots through Ethnography

Abstract

Touch is central to communication and social interaction. For both humans and robots touch is a mode through which they sense the world. A second wave of industrial robots is reshaping how touch operates within the labor process. Recent studies have turned their attention to the role of touch in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). While these studies have produced useful knowledge in relation to the affective capacities of robotic touch, methods remain restrictive. This paper contributes to expanding research methods for the study of robotic touch. It reports on the design of an ongoing ethnography that forms part of the InTouch project. The interdisciplinary project takes forward a socially orientated stance and is concerned with how technologies shape the semiotic and sensory dimensions of touch in the 'real world'. We contend that these dimensions are key factors in shaping how humans and robots interact, yet are currently overlooked in the HRI community. This multi-sited sensory ethnography research has been designed to explore the social implications of robotic touch within industrial settings (e.g. manufacturing and construction).

Collaborative Robots and Tangled Passages of Tactile-Affects

“…Ethnographic methods were employed with a view to generate contextual and textured accounts of touch and affect [38]. Our approach traces passages of affect as they emerge in, and circulate across, the field rather than reductively targeting phenomena to measure and address, by preselection or artificial initiating interactions/scenarios.…”

“…The research design uses ethnographic fieldwork across multiple industrial contexts to produce thick descriptions of how novel robotic technologies can remediate the dynamics of touch as situated in the social and sensory contexts of labour in the 'real world' (see [2], [3], [38], [39] for details on the methodological framing). In this theoretically orientated paper, we offer an ethnographic narrative derived from one site where a cobot had been recently introduced to assist with the task of 'swabbing' in a glass factory.…”

“…The principles that guide sensory ethnography align with a felt phenomenology [40] and phenomenologies of embodiment as orientated within affect theory [41]. This methodological approach was selected for its potential for producing contextually rich and dynamic descriptions of touch [38], gaining fresh insight for how affective ecologies become remediated through the presence of cobots 'in the wild'.…”

Filtering Touch: An Ethnography of Dirt, Danger, and Industrial Robots

“…The article reports on a sensory ethnography on the social implications of robotic touch in industry conducted across two sites (overview in Baker et al, 2020 ). Robotic touch as it appears in “the real world” consists of a set of highly differentiated events that are “spatially dispersed” and cannot be researched as a homogenous phenomenon.…”

“…The field researcher spent one week in each site, shadowing shift patterns of manual laborers. Participation (wherever possible) was a cornerstone of our approach: (1) to avoid the potential sterilizing impact of methodological distancing (e.g., relying too heavily on observation, conversation, and interviews) because we note that many contemporary ethnographies of “dirty work” keep the researcher at arm’s length from dirt ( Mccabe and Hamilton 2015 ; Morales and Lambert 2013 ; Sanders 2010 ); and (2) as touching and being touched is essential in “bringing the ethnographer closer to sensory and semiotic action” ( Barker, Jewitt, and Price 2020 , 129). Participation took the form of attending training; laboring alongside workers and robots; taking breaks and having conversations with workers; talking about touch (and other sociosensorial matters) with laborers during activity.…”