Meet Your Personal Cobot, But Don’t Touch It Just Yet*

Abstract

This paper reports on a research project aimed at introducing a collaborative industrial robot into a makerspace (a public machine shop equipped with digital manufacturing technologies). Using an ethnographic approach, we observed how collaborations between researchers and non-experts are facilitated by makerspaces, how robot safety is being construed and negotiated by the actors involved in the project; and how knowledge about collaborative robot safety and applications is produced in a context previously unforeseen by the creators of the technology. The proposed analysis suggests that the sociotechnical configuration of the studied project resembles that of a trading zone, in which various types of knowledge and expertise are exchanged between the researchers from the interdisciplinary project team and makerspace members. As we shall argue, the trading zone model can be useful in the analysis and organization of participatory HRI research.