Negotiating the Real World of Domestic Service Robotics

What values do technologists cite when evaluating technologies intended for application in “real world” social contexts like domestic settings? This paper examines the negotiation of values among the organizers who design and run the world’s largest domestic service robotics competition, RoboCup@Home. We perform an interpretive analysis of collaborative discussions from the organization’s open GitHub repositories and meeting notes from the years 2015-2023, informed by participatory digital ethnography and on-site fieldwork at the annual competition. Our analysis reveals the pervasive invocation of values, such as “realistic” and antivalues, such as “unfair”, in these discussions. We find that the perception of infeasibility strongly discouraged adoption of proposals that organizers otherwise agreed would have made RoboCup@Home, and domestic service robotics, more realistic, natural, and fair. We suggest future work pay attention to polysemy in negotiation of values, trace the shared values yet unrealized in negotiated settings, and consider infrastructural interventions that expand the feasibility of realizing values. The “real worlds” and values negotiated within spaces of competitive evaluation, be they imagined, realized, or unrealized, nonetheless shape the sociotechnical realities we and our technologies come to create and inhabit.