What is a robot?  Robots are now caught at the confluence of imagination and machination, as machine and AI capabilities are beginning to catch up with the robots of fiction. Technical literature maintains a focus on the robot as a tool, an amalgamation of software and hardware components. In the social sciences, the robot is defined by human understandings, drawn from historical fantasy, cultural imaginaries, media representations, political definitions, and situated practices. In REELER, we try to merge these definitions to understand the robot as both conceptual and material.

(Read more about how we define a robot and other relevant themes in the REELER Library.)

Ethnographic research seminar, April, Copenhagen

Researchers from Aarhus University (DK), De Montfort University (UK), and Ab.Acus srl (Italy) met to discuss ethnographic research methods for field studies in robotics and expected user-environments. We shared progress on ongoing case studies and refined our research methodology for the next round of reeling fieldwork. Meet our researchers...

Robot Expert Panel I, June 21, Copenhagen

REELER has invited roboticists from around Europe to our REP I event. Through a dramatic action method, we will create realistic scenarios with selected robots to explore ethical issues related to their design and implementation. We will follow up the social drama with a panel discusion on definitions of robots, and on distributed responsibility and ethics when dealing with a distributed technology like robots. (Read about our other recent activities, here.)