The social construction of human-robot co-work by means of prototype work settings

Abstract

Whether we look at Europe, the USA or Japan, in many areas in the world new possibilities of employing robotic systems in work settings essentially rely on direct collaborative interaction be-tween human workers and collaborative robots leading to new distributions of agency between them and making available robotic operations as resources for performing different forms of work, work which otherwise would remain out of reach for robotic automation for the time being. In this paper we introduce our concepts of studying the social construction of these collaborative work settings and the distribution of agency, accordingly. Referring to the basic idea of actor-network theory that technology in use should be analysed in a symmetrical manner, treating all the human and nonhuman entities involved as actors, our concept of distributed agency goes beyond actor-network theory in that it introduces the notion of gradualised action, which allows distinguishing between different levels of distributed agency. Therefore, we can precisely describe, in which way and to what extent activities and actor positions are delegated to robot co-workers or remain with its human counterpart. For analysing how the distribution of agency between human and robot co-workers is socially constructed in different stages, first in laboratory settings and then in increas-ingly realistic real-world settings, we interpret the spectrum of manifestations of human-robot col-laboration as prototypically realised scenarios at different stages of elaboration. In doing so we introduce the current state of collaborative robots in the areas of industrial production and care work as they represent contrastive cases: In industrial production collaborative robots are the next step in a long-standing history of robotic automation whereas in care work the new robots are also the first robots to be employed there. We believe that in both fields a perspective on collaborative work between humans and robots as a socio-technical constellation is helpful in order to be able to identify new distributions of work tasks.