A Reality Check on Imagined Futures

Perspectives on Robots

Not a traditional ‘roadmap’

This website presents the results of the project REELER (Responsible Ethical Learning in Robotics), as a roadmap for closing the gap between users and designers of robots. This is no traditional roadmap. You can take as many detours as you like. The main point is to raise awareness through our different contributions. At the bottom of each page is the REELER Roadmap, with different waypoints for navigating your way through responsible robotics, including:

  • Toolbox:  A number of fun awareness-raising tools, including the BuildBot board game.
  • Outreach: New methods for engaging with different stakeholder groups, as well as policy recommendations.
  • Research: Our methodology and findings, including an interdisciplinary publication that brings a reality check on robots and presents an expanded notion of the user. 
  • About REELER: Meet the whole interdisciplinary team behind this site and an overview of our main objectives.

Expanding notions of robots and users

Our futures with robots do not resemble the fantastic imaginaries in science fiction and popular media. Robots are made by real people in real places, and they will affect real people in real places. Robot development requires collaboration and complex relations between those who make robots and those who are affected by them. REELER has developed a model to explain this complexity, and to show the gaps between the robot makers (facilitators, robot developers, application experts) and affected stakeholders (end users, directly and distantly affected stakeholders).

An interdisciplinary publication for the wider robotics community

In this publication, we present the human proximity model and our main findings on normativity, meaningful work, innovation networks, imaginaries, and the inner circle of robot development.

Browse individual chapters online, or download the entire publication! 

 

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