A Human Factor Approach to HRI

Abstract

In today’s competitive marketplace, robotics and HRI is an exciting new paradigm for changing how work is done in organisations. Its potential success depends on how HRI fit to humans and other technologies in an organisation. The paper argues that the Human-Technology-Organisation framework may be used as an analytic tool to widen the understanding of prerequisites for successful development, implementation and deployment of HRI in organisations as well as for evaluations of existing HRI applications at work. This paper describes the Human-Technology-Organisation (HTO) framework, and ties it to HRI. It helps the reader to see HRI as a situated, local enactment involving diverse users, formal and informal rules and practices. Furthermore, it de-centers technology as the main agent of change. The aim of the paper is to provoke reflection and discussion about HRI, that through subtle interactions between humans, robots and organisations influence the quality of its development, implementation and deployment.