Sociorobotics - Semantic Antecedents

Professor Arvin Agah first coined the term 'sociorobotics' in 1993/4 to describe the study of robot team and colony behaviours but omitted to include himself and his colleagues as members and legitimate study subjects or actants of these sociorobotic assemblages. His and all robotocist's interactions with robots, robot teams or colony members, including human controllers/creators/programmers and indeed, robot to robot, constitute this previously undefined term of study that optimally represents and describes this emergent field of research which investigates the implications, complexities and design of spatial/social protocols and interactions of multiple robots, both with humans and each other.

"So who is pulling the strings? Well, the puppets do in addition to their puppeteers. It does not mean that puppets are controlling their handlers – this would be simply reversing the order of causality – and of course no dialectic will do the trick either. It simply means that the interesting question at this point is not to decide who is acting and how but to shift from a certainty about action to an uncertainty about action – but to decide what is acting and how.", (Bruno Latour, 2005, p.60)

 

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