Significant amounts of HRI research effort are spent on the design/evaluation of robot bodies. Critical discussion and debates concerning the way bodies are treated and considered within HRI have tended to focus on the implications of designing/interacting with highly anthropomorphic robots, yet drawing attention away from the human body in HRI, particularly in the context of everyday interactions with “unexpectedly” social robots, i.e. those non-humanoid robots that human users interact with in a somewhat “social” way. These kinds of robots crystallise particular aspects of (and tensions between) the different ways in which bodies are understood across disciplines. At the same time, a fundamental, and largely neglected tool for HRI research is the researchers’ own embodied experience of the intersubjective role. This workshop aims to put cross-disciplinary conversations on embodiment in HRI, and the different ways in which “the body” is variously conceptualised into active conversation through engaging an interdisciplinary panel of invited speakers and participant working groups. 

Social robots are imagined and developed to have capacities of reading and expressing “emotional cues” and some research is even venturing towards “empathic robots”. Ontological boundaries between human and robots are seemingly blurred here, and consequently, this might change the human status socially, economically, emotionally but could also provide a chance for a feminist posthuman shift towards relational values. In my research I investigate the relation between ontological and material boundaries of bodies to contribute to a concern about the social consequences of human-robot-interactions. Through new materialist and corporeal feminist theory, I examine the dermal boundary of human bodies and “touch points” in robotic bodies. My presentation addresses the question of affected boundaries and how affectivity relates bodies to one another. Reading through the biological processes of the skin boundary (such as cornification, shedding, and afference), I illustrate how boundaries between human and non-humans can be re-configured. These boundaries can be said to have affective capacity - they can be sticky, smooth, rough, extending and hence modify the kinds of relations that are possible between human and robot. Considering the role of affect beyond emotional models in interactions between bodies is important for the design and development of social robotic bodies. It explores what kind of “skin” is built for robot bodies to “touch” humans, that is not simply about interface and surface designs but considers the kind of relations that develop from the way these different bodies are in touch with one another. 

In her talk, Anna will share what she learned about different dimensions of sociality manifesting in human-robot encounters in everyday spaces beyond instances of anthropomorphising expressed in the language people use to articulate their experiences. Emphasizing the embodied and relational nature of these encounters, wherein all participants have agentive qualities, she further questions what this means for how in HRI and social robotics we conceptualize people who are not the direct users of technologies, but who nevertheless variously co-shape and co-constitute the daily operations of the robots. Furthermore, Anna will engage with selected literature on phenomenology of sociality to speculate how philosophical accounts of our bodily experience of living together in a shared world can inform our understanding of sociality in HRI.  

Robot lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners and self-driving cars avoid obstacles, approach charging stations, and so on—and therefore are commonly interpreted as intentional agents. The fact that robots share physical environments with people does not necessarily mean that they are situated in the same perceptual and social world as humans, though. For people encountering socially interactive systems, such as social robots or automated vehicles, this poses the nontrivial challenge to interpret them as intentional agents to understand and anticipate their behavior but also to keep in mind that the intentionality of artificial bodies is fundamentally different from their natural counterparts. The talk puts this in the context of certain “ironies” of automation and AI and discusses how social human-robot interaction requires, on one hand, a “suspension of disbelief” but, on the other hand, also a capacity for the “suspension of belief” – plus the cognitive capacity to switch between these modes of interpretation in social interactions.