As sidewalk delivery robots become increasingly integrated into urban life, this paper begins with a critical provocation: Is robot labor labor? More than a rhetorical question, this inquiry invites closer attention to the social and political arrangements that robot labor entails. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across two smart-city districts in Seoul, we examine how delivery robot labor is collectively sustained. While robotic actions are often framed as autonomous and efficient, we show that each successful delivery is in fact a distributed sociotechnical achievement--reliant on human labor, regulatory coordination, and social accommodations. We argue that delivery robots do not replace labor but reconfigure it--rendering some forms more visible (robotic performance) while obscuring others (human and institutional support). Unlike industrial robots, delivery robots operate in shared public space, engage everyday passersby, and are embedded in policy and progress narratives. In these spaces, we identify "robot privilege"--humans routinely yielding to robots--and distinct perceptions between casual observers ("cute") and everyday coexisters ("admirable"). We contribute a conceptual reframing of robot labor as a collective assemblage, empirical insights into South Korea's smart-city automation, and a call for HRI to engage more deeply with labor and spatial politics to better theorize public-facing robots.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Delivery robots in our two field sites in Seoul. Left: A robot crosses a busy intersection alongside office workers in Field A, a central business district. Right: Robots navigate a sidewalk in Field B, a smart city pilot district, passing outdoor café seating and drainage grates.
Robots designed to mediate human groups often fall into the solutionist trap: they are framed as sociable agents that fix problems such as conflict, disengagement, or lack of coordination. We suggest a different way of thinking. Rather than discrete agents, robots can be understood as situated elements of shared environments; catalysts and carriers of group experience whose meaning emerges through how people position, interpret, and interact with them. From this perspective, robots are not there to repair some ostensible dysfunctionality, but to enable group-level sense-making around care, norms, and identity. Our prior work on robotic street furniture suggests that this does not happen by imitating human sociality but by taking the shape of deliberately constrained, group-facing entities that happen and act for us without being socially entangled as one of us. We thus understand robots in public spaces not in terms of autonomy or intelligence, but as a relational capacity. This implies designing robots not in our image or for our utility, but grounded in our needs in being and becoming together.
Victor Tuan Vu Pham, Judith Dörrenbächer, Thomas H. Weisswange +1
Ubiquitous Design / Experience & Interaction, University of Siegen Siegen, Germany · Honda Research Institute Europe Offenbach am Main, Germany
Robot delivery studies can overstate transport capacity when travel to pickups and human support fall outside the modeled schedule. We formulate a location aware dispatch model that couples robot admission to transporter support and shared elevators, charging, and cleaning. The model replays 33,079 observed hospital requests; missing contents, deadlines, staffing, and completion times remain explicit scenario assumptions. Two full grids compare human dispatch, a resource aware controller, and a proximity and workload benchmark in 30 paired replications per scenario. An exploratory extension tests a simpler deadline admission rule under the same operating model. Pickup travel increases demand on a pooled elevator bank. In one high staffing case, raising assumed elevator capacity from two to four reduces human only lateness from 55.11% to 3.18%, exceeding the dispatch differences. Direct policy comparisons and robot coverage distinguish admission selectivity from system service. The analysis explains why a robot can pass a deadline admission test yet delay service through staff handoffs and shared facilities. Its contribution is a reproducible evaluation of coupled dispatch workflows, with a clear separation between admission, completion, and return to availability. The results are conditional comparisons, not estimates of hospital benefit or released clinical capacity.
Krzysztof Siwek, Aleksandra Świetlicka
Faculty of Electrical Engineering Warsaw University of Technology Koszykowa 75, 00-662 Warszawa · Faculty of Control, Robotics and Electrical Engineering Poznań University of Technology Piotrowo 3a, 61-138 Poznan
As the presence of autonomous robots in public spaces increases-whether navigating campus walkways or neighborhood sidewalks-understanding how to carefully study these robots becomes critical. While HRI research has conducted field studies in public spaces, these are often limited to controlled experiments with prototype robots or structured observational methods, such as the Wizard of Oz technique. However, the autonomous mobile robots we encounter today, particularly delivery robots, operate beyond the control of researchers, navigating dynamic routes and unpredictable environments. To address this challenge, a more deliberate approach is required. Drawing inspiration from public realm ethnography in urban studies, geography, and sociology, this paper proposes the Walk-Along with Robots (WawR) methodology. We outline the key features of this method, the steps we applied in our study, the unique insights it offers, and the ways it can be evaluated. We hope this paper stimulates further discussion on research methodologies for studying autonomous robots in public spaces.
EunJeong Cheon, Do Yeon Shin
School of Information Studies, Syracuse University · Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Chicago