Putting Human-Robot Interaction Research into Design Practice

As the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research field is relatively young and interdisciplinary, we spend a good deal of time and effort on communicating with each other, sharing ideas and empirical findings across disciplinary boundaries. While this practice is important and needs to continue, there is an increasingly pressing need for us to also communicate outside of this research community. I have met way too many designers, engineers, product managers, and roboticists, who tell me that they were either unaware that there was an HRI research community or that they have found our research community and have been disappointed by our work. That is unfortunate and it is fixable. Like the Human-Computer Interaction research community, we need to tackle this research-practice gap [1]. In this talk, I will make the case for why and how we might get started. There is so much to be gained by taking a Translational Science approach to HRI research. There are opportunities to do work that is grounded in real world problems, real people, and real robots. Furthermore, there are opportunities to make a difference in the design and deployment of robotic products and services right now. As just one example, in spending time studying robot deployments in service industries, at sea, and in the sky, we kept meeting professional Robot Wranglers. In many of our research projects, graduate students take on the Robot Wrangler role, which we claim will eventually disappear when the robots become “fully” autonomous. Looking across many industries, I believe that Robot Wranglers are here to stay. We could and should study them as real stakeholders and people. As HRI researchers, we have an opportunity to use our work to more directly inform the design of technologies. We can also find inspiration from the study of empirical [2]. I think it is time to roll up our sleeves and get better at communicating and working with the people who are building the future of robotics now. Publishing and presenting peer-reviewed papers is not where our work ends. We have much more work to do in translating our work in ways that will help others outside of our research community actually make use of our insights, engaging in collaborations with them, and coming back here to share and learn from stories about those experiences.