Category: Uncategorized

  • Service through the eyes of a robot: Robophilosophy 2024 presentation

    Service through the eyes of a robot: Robophilosophy 2024 presentation

    Service – from the robot‘s perspective In this paper, (video below), Chris Chesher and Justine Humphry ask: What does it mean to perform service work as a robot? This question might seem like a thought experiment straight out of a science fiction novel, but it was the starting point for our recent research at the…

  • Reflections on Robophilosophy 2024

    Robophilosophy in Aarhus was even better than I expected. Lots of good papers and many nice people working with humanities and social sciences approaches to robots. This theatre performance, called Replik.a, by a Stuttgart troupe, was a highlight. I really was not sure whether the second actor was a human or a robot until I…

  • From novelty to normal: Dining with robot waiters across Kuala Lumpur

    From novelty to normal: Dining with robot waiters across Kuala Lumpur

    Introduction It’s July 2023, and I’m in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with my wife, Cathy, on a mission to explore a trend that has quietly taken root in the city’s dining scene: robot waiters. Once a futuristic novelty popping up in social media feeds, these mechanical servers have begun to settle into the everyday rhythms of…

  • Beyond anthropomorphism symposium

    Beyond anthropomorphism symposium

    I am helping to organise a symposium with the Sydney Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems called ‘Beyond Anthropomorphism: Rethinking Human-Machine Relations in Robotics and AI’ on June 11 and 12, 2019.

  • Mining robotics and media change

    Mining robotics and media change

    Here’s a link to an article I wrote last year on the transformations in mining practices associated with digital technologies. In it I argue that changes even in such a large scale material practice can be considered as media changes.

  • Autonomous Robots compete to beat the field

    Autonomous Robots compete to beat the field

    The meaning of individual robots is put into relief when they face competition. This week I watched the National Instruments (NI) Autonomous Robotics Competition finals at Macquarie University as 27 teams placed their robots onto the playing field in the Lotus Theatre.

  • Google’s robot challenge

    Google’s robot challenge

    Google recently acquired eight high profile start-up robotics companies, providing strong evidence of a strategy to create breakthrough applications for robotics over the next decade. This strategy is most likely to concentrate on manufacturing and logistics.

  • Conveying copper ore at Northparkes Open Day

    Conveying copper ore at Northparkes Open Day

    The search for robots does not always end with finding discrete autonomous actors. The picture is more complex. In March, I travelled 7 hours West to visit the Open Day at Rio Tinto’s copper mine at Northparkes NSW (near Parkes) on March 2 2013. This visit was an opportunity to experience and understand some of…

  • Robot searching in belief space: field robots and their contingent encodings of unknown environments [CODE Abstract]

    Robot searching in belief space: field robots and their contingent encodings of unknown environments [CODE Abstract]

    Robotics research since the 1980s has been establishing codes, conventions and practices that are likely to govern a generation of autonomous robots that is becoming ready for the field. Today’s engineering choices will define the domains of possibility for robots that will inhabit domestic, public and professional spaces in the future.