Robot Research in the Wild: Water Transport in Rural India
What can we learn from bringing practical robotics to people who have never seen a robot before? Photo: University of Glasgow & Amrita University It’s easy for us to forget that the vast majority of the world doesn’t really care about (or even know about) robots. With that in mind, it’s understandable why most roboticists consider robots operating “in the wild” to be “anywhere that isn’t the controlled environment of my lab.” But there are “real world” environments, and then there’s the actual wild, and we almost never hear about research happening there. This is too bad, because we don’t have nearly enough appreciation for how robots can potentially be used to mitigate problems throughout the developing world. There’s also very little research into how different cultures react to robots with a social component—most human-robot interaction (HRI) studies rely on local participants who are easy (and cheap) to recruit, and are Continue reading Robot Research in the Wild: Water Transport in Rural India