Cultural Robotics: Diversified Sustainable Practices

Background

In Cultural Robotics (2016) we anatomized the topic of Cultural Robotics in four ways; Robots as Maintainers of Culture, Robots as Participants in Culture, Robots as Producers of Culture, and speculation concerning the Advent of Robotics Culture, as a means of defining the spectrum of integration between robots with human culture and beyond. Within this publication, it was concluded that social robots would soon advance beyond interactive embodied entities, to social agents with meaningful cultural impact on a range of human communities and activities, with the potential means to create a culture that might be entirely foreign and incomprehensible to human culture.

In the second installment of Cultural Robotics (2023), we advanced upon the demonstrated integration of robotics deeply into many aspects of human activity and culture, and approached cultural robotics as a political ecology of social robotics: that is, a lens for analyzing the far-reaching impacts of the integration of robots into the human lived experience. We defined ‘political ecology’ as the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes; in this context, we view the ‘environment’ as the human social sphere.

This third instalment and second workshop on Cultural Robotics aims to bring together diverse cultural perspectives to explore how robotics development can effectively integrate sustainability and circular economy principles (knowledge sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials) to foster environmentally responsible and socially inclusive innovation when prototyping, testing and developing social robots.

Motivation

The use of the term Cultural Robotics was first explored in depth by Hooman Samani et al. [1], who attributed the development of culture in robotics to the cultural values of the designers, the importance of embodiment in robotics, and the current (and potential) learning capacity of robots. Samani et al. proposed the potential progression of robots from simple tools, to luxury items, to members of human society and projected that they would one day become an integral part of our culture. In 2015, Dunstan and Koh, together with David Silvera-Tawil, held a workshop at IEEE RO-MAN in Kobe, Japan, which called for contributions attending to what was a relatively new premise: in what ways are social robots participants in, and creators of, culture? The contributions from over fifteen different countries yielded surprising breadth and depth, which signified a growing interest in the influence and contributions of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) to culture, as well as the influence of human cultures on the design and applications of social robots. The research presented at the 2015 workshop was brought together and published as a collection of works entitled Cultural Robotics [2]. In the opening chapter of this book, Dunstan et. al. described how robots could not only be maintainers of and participants in human culture but could also have the potential to develop their own culture, entirely unrecognisable to humans.

Revisiting this field in 2023, Dunstan et al. edited a book entitled Cultural Robotics: Social Robots and their Emergent Cultural Ecologies [3] offering a new lens for examining the reach of social robotics, that of a cultural ecology, where consideration for the broader political, economic, and social factors impacted by this field become inseparable to the evaluation of it.  They argued for the development of social robotics to be increasingly informed by community-led transdisciplinary research, to be decentralised and democratised, shaped by teams with a diversity of backgrounds, informed by both experts and non-experts, and tested in both traditional and non-traditional platforms.

Looking forward in the field of Cultural Robotics, we now hope to draw on the many diverse cultural robotics practices we have seen evidenced within this previous work, to collaboratively share methods for inclusive sustainability and longevity in robotics development.

Workshop Format

The full-day workshop will include presentations from a highly international group of researchers, spanning the widest possible scope of cultural diversity. Following our previous two publications (Springer 2016, 2023) in the space of Cultural Robotics, the workshop will culminate in a publication of proceedings contributing to a strong legacy of dissemination on the topic.
The workshop will begin with panel presentations of short papers grouped into key themes, to allow for robust cross-cultural discussion among the panels as well as informal Q&A engagement with the audience. Mid-morning will feature an invited keynote from internationally renowned social roboticist, Professor Luisa Damiano, author of Living with Robots. Professor Damiano is a full professor of logic and philosophy of science at the IULM University, specialising in Epistemology of the Sciences of the Artificial, and is a highly engaging public speaker. The afternoon session will feature longer presentations as well as an invited presentation from Associate Professor Jeffrey Koh from Singapore Institute of Technology, Head of Design Factory, and renown sustainable designer, of notable interest to the workshop topic.
Each longer presentation is followed by an opportunity for break-out discussion groups to continue the conversation among the attendees, and the annotation of conversation points on large poster paper will facilitate on-going discussion in the breaks. Mid-afternoon there will be a hands-on workshop, where attendees will have the opportunity to build (and take home) their own “milk-bottle robot”. The workshop will focus on lean-design principles for planning and puppeteering expressive robotic movement from recycled materials, facilitated by Belinda J Dunstan. 

Tentative Schedule (Full Day 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM)

Approach for Recruiting Participants

Following on from our previous edited publications and workshop on Cultural Robotics, we have accrued a large international network of robotics research labs, across 17 different countries (Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China (Hong Kong), Singapore, USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Denmark, Brazil, Mexico, Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Germany, Cyprus, Hungary, Italy). Issuing a call to our networks and their connected universities and labs will reach a significant and culturally diverse audience.

In addition to engaging with the existing Cultural Robotics network, we aim to expand reach via social platforms. This includes general social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., as well as conference-specific web aggregators such as conferenceindex.org, internationalconferencealerts.com, conferencelists.org, conferencenext.com, and others. Finally, we will engage with our institutional communications teams to disseminate the workshop call to industry and professional researchers, alumni, local and regional academics, and other stakeholders within our respective universities’ networks.

Participant Numbers

• Accepted papers: 15

• Estimated number of presenters: 11

• Estimated number of participants: 30-50 (no upper limit).

Target Audience / Pre-requisites

The full-day workshop will welcome submissions from a highly international group of researchers, spanning the widest possible scope of cultural diversity, including but not limited to, engineers, designers, artists, researchers, educators, and professionals from related fields who are passionate about driving forward-thinking and responsible robotics innovations. No pre-requisites.

Plan to Encourage Interaction Among Participants

The workshop program includes timetabled opportunities for participants to discuss and ask questions following each panel and paper presentation. The audience will have the opportunity to ask questions in multiple ways- including directly to the presenters, or anonymously online via the workshop Slido, which will be monitored throughout the workshop.

The workshop room layout will be organized around tables, so that participants are naturally arranged in discussion groups throughout the day.  Each table will include Post-it notes, large marker pens, and large paper, to encourage the groups to mind-map or illustrate their discussions throughout the sessions, visualizing the group’s perspectives and allowing for a pin-up or layout process during the breaks, where attendees can see the visualized discussions of other groups, and discuss further informally.

The planned hands-on workshop is highly interactive, taught by an experienced robotics tertiary educator. Each participant will cut, glue, thread and build their own expressive ‘milk-bottle robot’, and then puppeteer different emotions/ interaction scenarios and perform the final outcome among their small groups, or if they are comfortable, to the rest of the attendees.

Dissemination & Documentation of the Workshop

We have received confirmation from Springer LNCS that they are willing to publish the proceedings of the workshop based on our previous track record for dissemination (please see email included below). For an example of our previous workshop proceedings, please refer to the following link:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-42945-8

Abstracts of the accepted papers and documentation of the workshop will be archived online on the CultureBots website.

Workshop URL

https://www.culturebots.org/ 

Submission Guidelines

TBD

For inquiries and paper submissions, please contact culturebots@gmail.com

References

[1]     Samani, H., Saadatian, E., Pang, N., Polydorou, D., Fernando, O.N.N., Nakatsu, R. and Koh, J.T.K.V., Cultural robotics: The culture of robotics and robotics in culture. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 10(12), 2013, p.400.

[2]     Koh, J.T., Dunstan, B.J., Silvera-Tawil, D. and Velonaki, M., Cultural robotics. In First international workshop, CR. Springer, 2015.

[3]     Dunstan, B. J., Cultural Robotics: Social Robots and Their Emergent Cultural Ecologies. J. T. Koh, D. T. Tillman, & S. A. Brown (Eds.). Springer International Publishing. 2023.