Autonomous Systems and Robotics in Society

From the familiar robot vacuum cleaner to AI‑powered drones, robots are becoming part of everyday life. How can we design robots that respect our consent, our sense of touch, and our personal space? How do robots influence human relationships, group dynamics, and the way people interact with one another? And how do robots impact society, specifically the future of work, care and labor?

These are some of the central questions explored by researchers in the WASP‑HS research environment Autonomous Systems and Robotics in Society. The group investigates how robots are used in everyday life – and how we, in turn, can design robots to support society in human-centered ways.

Pelikan, H., Lampinen, A., Garrett, R., Hofstetter, E., Hoskins, A., Kuehn, H., Leite, I., McMillan, D., Passero, S., Winkle, K. and Broth, M., 2026. Making Sense of the Felt Experience of Controlling Autonomous Systems. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS’26)(Singapore, Singapore). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi. org/10.1145/3800645.3812868.

Katie Winkle, Donald McMillan, Maria Arnelid, Katherine Harrison, Madeline Balaam, Ericka Johnson, and Iolanda Leite. 2023. Feminist Human-Robot Interaction: Disentangling Power, Principles and Practice for Better, More Ethical HRI. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 72–82. https://doi.org/10.1145/3568162.3576973

Hannah R. M. Pelikan, Stuart Reeves, and Marina N. Cantarutti. 2024. Encountering Autonomous Robots on Public Streets. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 561–571. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610977.3634936