Robots Will Transform Our Social Spaces, How City Design Will Adapt to Robots

As cities experience an increasing number of robotic workforce, the need for robot friendly design is becoming ever more critical. From our hawker centers to parks, the future of urban housing and mobility may just be shaped for and by the robots that we will live with. There is no denying it: like it or not we are witnessing a service robotics revolution, in both professional and personal domains. From residential floor cleaning to logistics delivery missions, robotics offers enormous advantages in improving productivity, efficiency and safety. Professional service robots are used outside of the home and traditional manufacturing scenarios.

They automate commercial processes that may or may not be within the industrial sector. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) predicts an average growth rate of 20 to 25% between 2018 and 2020 for the professional service robots market, reaching $27 billion in value. Personal service robots, on the other hand, are consumer-facing robots for automating tasks, mostly within the home. This could include things like autonomous vacuum cleaners or window cleaners. This is a much smaller segment of service robots, but the IFR still predicts the market to be worth $11 billion by 2020. Most of these service robots will likely live in cites, this will present huge challenges, and cities will need to adapt. Of course, an increasing robotics population is not inherently a bad thing: Advancements in technology, such as cloud, IoT, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, are making the adoption of robots beneficial and easy. However, as we embrace more and more robots, our infrastructure needs change. By preparing for this, policymakers, town planners and architects can make it more likely that robots can lead inclusive lives within our society. Untapped potential for too long, much of the conversation around service robots has revolved around them stealing our jobs and we humans becoming slaves to machines.

We have to reframe this discussion in terms of the potential of service robots. Many of these intelligent machines have the potential to mitigate the combined pressure of skyrocketing costs, aging populations in industrialized countries, and a shortage of qualified workers, as well as the need to continuously improve the quality of services and results. It is projected that sales of all types of robots for domestic tasks (vacuum cleaning, lawnmowing, window cleaning and other types) could reach almost 6. 7 million units (valued US$ 2bn in 2017) and 32. 4 million units in the period 2018-2020, with an estimated value of US$ 11. 3bn. Other market surveys have also shed light on how robots are increasingly entering our social spaces and making lives better for humans. To enable and empower service robots to contribute productively in the workplace, we need to rethink the designs of their workplaces. Traditionally, design of contemporary new spaces and everyday artefacts such as lighting and furniture target the majority of well able-bodied population until recently apposite design principles were introduced in response to individuals with special needs such as children, elderly and user groups with physical and/or sensory disabilities. Since cognitive capacity, physical strength and speed, visual acuity, and auditory sensitivity are still evolving, ergonomic workplace designs that accounts for robots as stakeholders will become increasingly important. Given how robots, like human workers, are an incredibly diverse group with different needs, it will also be necessary to apply universal design principles to promote wellbeing and safety for robots of all applications.

To this end, Singapore University of Technology and Design is developing an emerging research field “Robot Ergonomics” that bridges traditional disciplines including architecture, product design and robotics based on the premise that service robots and the everyday environments that they inhabit with humans (buildings, products, furniture, tools, etc. ) are more adequately conceived when designers across disciplines work in unison. Robot Ergonomics remains a marginal research area, despite the significant growth in the adoption of service robots. In robotics, increasingly complex and autonomous systems are being developed in order to cope with everyday tasks in pre-defined physical environments. Strategies place all the responsibility on the robot by combining advanced sensors, control and actuators to achieve relatively simple capabilities such as turning a handle to open doors, when the location, shape and behavior of the handles are unpredictable and highly variant.

Robot Ergonomics design significantly decreases the difficulty of such tasks by taking into consideration the characteristics of robots when designing the space without overstepping into human preferences. Bridging the decision-making in robot and spatial design carries a twofold advantage: designers view robots as target stakeholders, and roboticists build upon the environment’s features to make future robots highly capable at manageable costs. Through an inductive study of popular cleaning and logistics robots in the market, we derived a set of design principles that can be used by practitioners to generate robot-inclusive solutions. The principles put forward offers valuable insights for ethnographic studies of such domestic robots and the type of effects that everyday furniture and spaces have in their performance. In the future, the way forward in designing workplaces will not be to adopt a one size fits all approach, but rather one that gives robots the flexibility to adapt the workplace to suit their own needs while prioritizing the human preferences. To see how robot ergonomic considerations can boost productivity, we need look no further than University of Washington where a research group has designed a low-cost universal tool attachment that makes the tool robot-friendly. The team demonstrated the performance gain provided by the attachment on 10 different tools in the three stages of tool use: grasping the tool, applying the tool, and placing the tool. Needless to say, discussions about the robot ergonomics cannot just include professional service robots that operate in work settings; we must address the challenges and opportunities for personal service robots as well that co-live with humans in domestic settings.

The ongoing work at SUTD and University of Washington are just two examples of how workplaces can be successfully redesigned to help robots work productively. We need to expand and adapt these efforts to all other lines of work – be they food and beverage, transport, construction, or healthcare. We would need more generalized education so that it is possible for architects and roboticians to co-design robots and spaces unleashing robots from research labs into commercial world. Given that colleges and universities have institutional inertia in brining disciplines together, this challenge is not trivial. Ultimately, efforts to design for a robotic workforce need to go hand in hand with other initiatives to make the workplace more inclusive. There needs to be a shift to more acceptance and flexible workplace arrangements involving humans and robots and a shift in attitudes about robots. Robots are co-workers that make lives better for us and not there to steel our jobs, and it is time we take bigger strides to recognize that. The challenge is to be cognizant of the human preferences, costs and risks, so that one can develop robot ergonomic strategies to meet the future with resilience.