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Field Notes on Deploying Research Robots in Public Spaces

Fanjun Bu, Alexandra Bremers, Mark Colley, Wendy Ju

TL;DR

This work tackles the paucity of in-the-wild HRI evaluations by detailing field deployments of two trash-barrel robots in NYC plazas using Wizard-of-Oz teleoperation and post-interaction interviews. It provides concrete, practice-ready guidelines across consent, emergent protocol, hardware/software design, site selection, data collection, and media management, accompanied by a public GitHub repository to share lessons learned. The contributions offer a practical blueprint for researchers aiming to study human-robot interactions in public spaces and to standardize knowledge sharing, thereby accelerating responsible, real-world HRI development. The reported findings underscore the distinct challenges of field deployments and emphasize the value of community-driven sharing to shape policy-relevant, urban-robot interactions.

Abstract

Human-robot interaction requires to be studied in the wild. In the summers of 2022 and 2023, we deployed two trash barrel service robots through the wizard-of-oz protocol in public spaces to study human-robot interactions in urban settings. We deployed the robots at two different public plazas in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn for a collective of 20 hours of field time. To date, relatively few long-term human-robot interaction studies have been conducted in shared public spaces. To support researchers aiming to fill this gap, we would like to share some of our insights and learned lessons that would benefit both researchers and practitioners on how to deploy robots in public spaces. We share best practices and lessons learned with the HRI research community to encourage more in-the-wild research of robots in public spaces and call for the community to share their lessons learned to a GitHub repository.

Field Notes on Deploying Research Robots in Public Spaces

TL;DR

This work tackles the paucity of in-the-wild HRI evaluations by detailing field deployments of two trash-barrel robots in NYC plazas using Wizard-of-Oz teleoperation and post-interaction interviews. It provides concrete, practice-ready guidelines across consent, emergent protocol, hardware/software design, site selection, data collection, and media management, accompanied by a public GitHub repository to share lessons learned. The contributions offer a practical blueprint for researchers aiming to study human-robot interactions in public spaces and to standardize knowledge sharing, thereby accelerating responsible, real-world HRI development. The reported findings underscore the distinct challenges of field deployments and emphasize the value of community-driven sharing to shape policy-relevant, urban-robot interactions.

Abstract

Human-robot interaction requires to be studied in the wild. In the summers of 2022 and 2023, we deployed two trash barrel service robots through the wizard-of-oz protocol in public spaces to study human-robot interactions in urban settings. We deployed the robots at two different public plazas in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn for a collective of 20 hours of field time. To date, relatively few long-term human-robot interaction studies have been conducted in shared public spaces. To support researchers aiming to fill this gap, we would like to share some of our insights and learned lessons that would benefit both researchers and practitioners on how to deploy robots in public spaces. We share best practices and lessons learned with the HRI research community to encourage more in-the-wild research of robots in public spaces and call for the community to share their lessons learned to a GitHub repository.
Paper Structure (20 sections, 1 figure)

This paper contains 20 sections, 1 figure.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Study Overview
  3. Guidelines on Deployment
  4. Consent
  5. Interviews
  6. Emergent Protocol
  7. Guidelines Regarding the Robots
  8. Hardware
  9. Software
  10. On Behavior Design
  11. Emergency Button and Watchdog
  12. Testing in Lab vs. in the Field
  13. Debugging in the Field
  14. Guidelines on Study Site
  15. Permission
  16. ...and 5 more sections

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: Left: hardware communication setup. Right: ROS structure. Joysticks are connected to RPi4s via Bluetooth. Wizards' commands are sent to the RPi4s on the robot via Wifi. On the ROS side, the process joy_node reads raw signals from joysticks and publishes them on the /joy topic. The teleop node converts these raw signals to twist commands, which are published to /cmd_vel topic.