The fabrication of humanoid robots : methods, media and artefacts

Abstract

In recent years, social and cultural science research has examined both the human–robot relationship and the social discourses that accompany the development of humanoid robots. Research has focussed less intensively on the development of this type of robot. This is where the article comes in: it provides empirical insight into the research practice of symbolic robotics, its procedures and media. It observes and analyses roboticists as they sketch robotic movement in space by hand, develop mathematical formulas and transfer them to the digital script of programming. The paper understands these developmental steps as iterative-recursive phases of an experimental setting of robotics laboratories and analyses the relationship between physical and digital artefacts, epistemic objects and media of thought, representation and communication, as well as the practice of roboticists. With their designing and testing, correcting and recalculating, which the essay understands as a continuous confrontation with their designs and programming, the artefacts and materials, roboticists shift the boundary between their (non-) knowledge and what is still unknown.