A Checklist for Deploying Robots in Public: Articulating Tacit Knowledge in the HRI Community

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive, community-refined checklist to guide researchers in deploying robots in public spaces, aiming to reduce common pitfalls and document tacit knowledge in human-robot interaction.

Contribution

It presents a modular, hierarchical checklist based on expert interviews and real-world applications, serving as an open-source resource for the HRI community.

Findings

Checklist improves deployment planning

Community input refines the guidelines

Open-source tool supports continuous updates

Abstract

Many of the challenges encountered in in-the-wild public deployments of robots remain undocumented despite sharing many common pitfalls. This creates a high barrier of entry and results in repetition of avoidable mistakes. To articulate the tacit knowledge in the HRI community, this paper presents a guideline in the form of a checklist to support researchers in preparing for robot deployments in public. Drawing on their own experience with public robot deployments, the research team collected essential topics to consider in public HRI research. These topics are represented as modular flip cards in a hierarchical table, structured into deployment phases and important domains. We interviewed six interdisciplinary researchers with expertise in public HRI and show how including community input refines the checklist. We further show the checklist in action in context of real public studies. Finally, we contribute the checklist as an open-source, customizable community resource that both collects joint expertise for continual evolution and is usable as a list, set of cards, and an interactive web tool.