Trash in Motion: Emergent Interactions with Robotic Trashcans

Author

Barry Brown, Fanjun Bu, Ilan Mandel, Wendy Ju, CHI 2024

Keywords

Public interaction, human-robot interaction, ethnomethodology

WHAT

  • How human without prior training or information about their use interactes with the robotic trashcans?

WHY

  • autonomous robots become common in use in the city life

  • little or no training information given about their use and behavior

HOW

  • Methods

    • Wizard of Oz

  • Apparatus

    • 2 robotic trashcans with normal appearance: one recycling and one landfill

    • manipulated by the wizard behind

  • Instrumentation

    • 360° camera

    • first-person and third-person view

    • 2 overview GoPro camera

    • 360 view mode and equirectangular mode

  • Deployment

    • 5 deployment on 5 days

    • 2 wizard control

  • Wizard instructions

    • brief instructions: to interact ’naturally’ with the users in the square, and gave the flexibility to choose to operate the trashcan as they see fit.

  • Authorization and Consent

  • Data Approach

    • moment-by-moment interaction

    • ethnomethodology

    • conversation analysis

    • build a corpus of video data

    • 2 authors extract the events

    • 164 interaction highlight spanned 135 minutes or 32% of the overall trial time

  • Data Selection

    • 20 clips that featured interactions that

were smooth, problematic, or seemed unusual or typical

Results

  • Giving and getting trash

  • Moving in the square

  • Demonstrations

Discussion

  • SSSS Framework

    • Systematics

    • Sequential

    • Simple

    • Spontaneous

  • Designing for Spontaneous Simple Sequential Systematics

  • Urban robotics: in the space or of the space?