First International Workshop on Worker-Robot Relationships

Abstract

In Industry 5.0, cognitive robots and workers will engage in evolving and reciprocal relations, which we call worker-robot relationships (WRRs). To enable evidence-based work futures with workers, we must co-develop WRRs and understand their impact on work, workers, management, and society. To this end, we posit that the HRI field should work beyond disciplines and include value-driven and plural perspectives through transdisciplinary research done with and for workers. However, WRRs and transdisciplinarity pose unique technical, design, and methodological challenges yet to be explored. We propose a workshop to engage the HRI community working on Industry 5.0, aiming at 1) taking stock of current WRR-related challenges in relevant disciplines, 2) collectively kick-off the exploration of a joint research agenda, 3) preliminary examining if and how transdisciplinarity could help the HRI community, and 4) start discussing how to deal with such complex knowledge integration in practice.