Robots Mediating Interaction

Understanding Interaction and Perception in Collaborative Work via Cobots

Collaborative robots—cobots—present conceptually novel challenges to those of industrial robots in that they are imagined as situated amidst individuals and social groups as opposed to operating within ‘separated’ environments. Collaboration is often formulated in terms of improving dyadic human-cobot interaction. But a much broader issue is the way cobots are embedded into social circumstances, interacting with and around multiple people or groups. This project  investigates cobots as mediators by setting up a series of scenarios in which physically distributed groups engage in collaborative tasks where cobots provide support in mediating between them.

Project team: Stuart Reeves, Ayse Kucukyilmaz, Sarah Martindale, Dominic Price,  Marise Galvez Trigo, Pepita Barnard, Shazmin Majid

Partners; Unilever, BlueSkeye AI

Introduction blog, mid blog, extension blog, update blog

University of Nottingham Press Release: New Study finds invisible ‘human work’ allows robots to deliver

Best Paper ACM/IEEE International Conference in Human-Robot Interaction: Encountering Autonomous Robots on Public Streets

Start date: 1^st April 2021 – 31 March 2022, extended to run until 30 September 2022

This project sits within Horizon’s Agile programme