Nature-Robot Interaction

Up until now, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has been largely defined by the influences both humans and robots exert on each other across various interaction modes. Robots follow human purpose and serve goals determined by humans with various degrees of agency. Humans act, respond, and adapt to robot behaviors while simultaneously advancing technology to increase robot's affordances. Abstracted by this dyad, HRI has left out the material background making this exchange possible: Nature. The current planetary crisis forces us to reconsider the importance of contextualizing HRI within a larger picture, and invites us to ask ourselves how this relationship can be better served by considering Nature as the driving agent in this binary relationship. In response to this reflection, we present a first attempt of a speculative paradigm in HRI: Nature-Robot Interaction. We discuss ethical and design underpinnings of this approach to HRI, introduce initial guiding principles, as well as examples of potential affordances, embodiments and interactions. While we begin in the realm of the speculative and recognize the infancy of our proposal, we invite the HRI community to it as a serious design principle moving forward.