Human-robot relationships and the development of responsible social robots

The contemporary development of social robots has been accompanied by concerns over their capacity to cause harm to humans. Our RoboTIPS study sets out to design and trial an innovative design feature that will advance the safe operation of social robots and foster societal trust. The Ethical Black Box (EBB) collects data about a robot's actions in real time and in context; when an incident occurs, this data can be used within a wider investigation process to determine what went wrong and prevent similar adverse events. In this paper we draw on Lucy Suchman's groundbreaking work on human-machine relationships to elucidate the goals, practices and potential impact of our study. We align with Suchman's positioning of safety as an accomplishment of situated action and draw on her analysis to describe the actions of the EBB-enhanced social robot as contingent on context and the robot's status as a social agent. We also describe shared priorities in our methodological approaches. We close with observations on how participatory design and an ethnomethodologically-informed stance towards data collection and analysis can contribute to the field of responsible innovation (RI), which seeks to ensure that innovations are undertaken in the public interest and provide societal value.