Emergent Cultural Ecologies in Social Robotics

This chapter introduces the edited collection Cultural Robotics: Social Robots and their Emergent Cultural Ecologies. We present and describe the three themes that we see as contemporarily emergent within cultural robotics research: human futures, assistive technology, and creative platforms and their communities. With these themes demarcating the publication, we canvas the contributions to each section. We offer a new lens for examining the reach of social robotics, that of cultural ecology, where consideration for the broader political, economic, and social factors impacted by this field become inseparable to our evaluation of it. We argue for the development of social robotics to be increasingly informed by community-led transdisciplinary research, to be decentralised and democratised, shaped by teams with a diversity of backgrounds, informed by both experts and non-experts, and tested in both traditional and non-traditional platforms.