Collaborative Robots: New Socio-Technical Constellations and Dominant Narratives

Content:

In the last two decades, a new type of robots has emerged. Unlike the established manufacturing robots that operate behind fences, these robots are designed to collaborate with humans in their immediate proximity. Although not too many of these robots are already employed in real-world environments, we can observe a huge variety of specific application scenarios in which these robots are being developed and tested. Moreover, collaborative robots are associated with far-reaching expectations, such as solving the care crisis or realizing entirely new forms of flexibility in industrial manufacturing.

The session aims to bring together empirical contributions on the development and consequences of collaborative robotics. Issues like the following are addressed:

* What new forms of human-robot collaboration emerging from the introduction of these robots can already be observed today? What are the consequences of their introduction for the human workforce? And how does the introduction of these robots change the wider socio-technical constellation, for instance in organizational, legal or political terms?

* What dominant narratives frame the grand promises of collaborative robotics? Do these narratives differ with respect to application domains? And how do these narratives affect the concrete design of robots, tasks and deployment domains?

* Where do the concrete application ideas and scenarios for these robots come from? Why do developers as well as professionals from the fields of application often cling to obviously unrealistic scenarios? And in what ways could more realistic and user-friendly deployment scenarios be developed?

Format:

Regular session