Abstract
Under framings of grand challenges, robotics has been proposed as a solution to a wide range of societal issues such as road safety, ageing society, economic productivity and climate change. However, what exactly is robotics research? From its inception, robotics has been an inherently interdisciplinary field, bringing together diverse domains such as engineering, cognitive science, computer science and, more recently, knowledge from social sciences and humanities. Previous research on interdisciplinarity shows that this mode of knowledge production is often driven by societal concerns and political choices. The politics of who gets to make these choices and on what terms is the focus of empirical research in this paper. Using a novel mixed-method approach combining bibliometrics, desk-based analysis and fieldwork, this article builds a narrative of interdisciplinarity at the UK’s largest public robotics lab, the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. This paper argues for the recognition of the plural ways of knowing interdisciplinarity. From citation analysis, through tracing of the emerging fields and disciplines, to, finally, the investigation of researchers’ experiences; each method contributes a distinct and complementary outlook on “what robotics is made of”. While bibliometrics allows visualising prominent disciplines and keywords, document analysis reveals influential and missing stakeholders. Meanwhile, fieldwork explores the logics underpinning robotics and identifies the capabilities necessary to perform the research. In doing so, the paper synthesises plural ways of locating politics in interdisciplinary research and provides recommendations for enabling “structural preparedness for interdisciplinarity”.
Highlights
We encounter robots with increasing regularity in everyday life
Results are further discussed in section “Results”, where we introduce three case studies, each used to identify capabilities valued in three interdisciplinary research areas at Bristol Robotics Lab (BRL)
To reflect how Web of Science (WoS) categories apply to BRL, we name them as follows: machine software, machine hardware, environment, medicine, human factors and society
Summary
Emerging from secluded military settings and heavy industry, and characterised as self-driving vehicles, assistive living technologies and home cleaning, robots are designed to work both in and for society. Innovation in self-driving vehicles is today’s quintessential case of robots entering society. As with other forms of innovation, technology development is itself a site of political contestation (Winner, 1997; Noble, 1984; Feenberg, 2002). At these sites lie a host of political questions and choices. In the case of self-driving vehicles questions are so often framed narrowly around road safety. Who will benefit from these transformations and how will those benefits be distributed? Will inequalities in society worsen? What environmental or economic harms might be created through the manufacture and use of such technologies? How will self-driving vehicles re-shape personal responsibility on roads and in public spaces, and with what consequences for litigation, education and regulation?
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