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Although interactive robots have made significant strides, several technical challenges still need to be addressed before they can become part of everyday life. Technologies such as speech recognition and computer vision have improved considerably, but their performance in uncontrolled, real-world environments remains unreliable.

Future embodied agents are expected to be more than isolated autonomous units. By being connected through the cloud, they will form systems of distributed intelligence. This evolution brings with it a range of challenges, especially in terms of safety, data control, and reliability.

One of the most critical aspects of interaction is the ability to predict human behavior. Smooth communication depends on our capacity to anticipate the actions of others and to make our own actions predictable in return. Robots must be equipped with models that support this mutual understanding.

Hardware limitations also present major obstacles. For example, no artificial hand currently matches the dexterity of a human hand. Sensory experiences such as touch, taste, and smell are not yet fully understood, nor is their integration with other senses. Even though two-legged motion has seen remarkable progress, robots are still not stable or cost-effective enough for large-scale use.

Literature and the arts have long shaped how robots are understood and valued. The term "robot" itself originated in Karel ÄŒapek’s 1921 play R.U.R., highlighting their cultural roots. Science fiction has especially influenced robot design and perception, with Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” becoming central to ethical debates in AI.

Humanoid robots often reflect iconic sci-fi imagery, such as those in Metropolis (1927) and Ex Machina (2014).Artistic portrayals also raise critical questions about automation’s social impact. Robots in fiction often mirror societal anxieties around race, gender, and class—seen in feminized assistants like Siri or fears of job displacement.Dystopian narratives frequently depict automation worsening inequality, while others envision its potential for inclusive futures.Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985) framed automation as a crossroads: either deepening precarity or enabling radical transformation. Since then, artists in theater and dance have used robotic technologies to explore these possibilities.

As AI and robots become more integrated into daily life, literature and the arts remain vital for interpreting their meaning. The robots of tomorrow will reflect the stories we tell today—shaping not just technology, but our shared humanity.

The imagination of what robots and drones can do for society are many but societies continue to struggle with the widespread use. Future visions are essential for establishing legitimacy for the technology and its use, securing support from potential stakeholders and access to resources, and ultimately for supporting the necessary changes to enable the use of the technology. A systems perspective is adopted to identify some of the root causes of the lacking transformations required for widespread adoption. 

As an example. Proponents of a new technology must continuously secure resources, develop the technology, and attract new firm entry, even before the technology demonstrates tangible commercial results. The guide is a compelling vision like, “Pizza delivery to the door by drone” or “Robot taking over care of elderly members of society”. So even though societies have formulated some visions for the use of the technology and resources are awarded to companies and start-ups, the widespread use is still not realized.

The  business perspective approaches this research gap by identifying the causes and mechanisms and asks for instance:

• Why do investments in technology development continue despite the low adoption in society?
• What are the long-term implications—good and bad—of implementing the technology in society, which must be considered in the near-future?
• What is the role of businesses as compared to other stakeholders like institutions and the public in enabling the transformations of society towards use of interactive robots?

Visions of robots in everyday life abound in public discourse. Such visions include self-driving cars, robotic drivers, companion robots, housekeeping bots, personalized museum guides, robotic pets and nannies for children. Since the advent of Generative AI, visions increasingly refer to the possibilities of extensive Generative AI customization of robotic interactions with humans. Discourse is often polarized, voicing either highly utopian or highly dystopian views of the future-to-come – or, indeed, of the future as allegedly (almost) here already. Such views – and beliefs about what exists today or may exist tomorrow – are affected by, sustained and propelled through the images rendered to us by real, existing robots and their portrayal on YouTube channels, but also through their depiction in sci-fi books and movies; the latter to the extent that some debates appear out of touch with what is possible today or anytime soon. This includes issues such as robots’ free will, individualized living and legal rights.

In contrast to the contemporary “robotic imaginary” (Rhee 2018) that is shaped through such visions, robots in current use in everyday life are specialized and require extensive reorganization of the human and material environment to function. Robotic vacuum cleaners need humans to tidy up before they clean so as not to get stuck in a clothes pile or suck up the wrong things. Robots in health care are designed to carry out specific tasks such as taking a blood sample, and for that reason typically only consists of one arm, rather than a full body. The same is true for most industrial robots. Bots in museums and restaurants repeatedly ask people to step out of the way as they have limited options of navigating around things that can move.

Which developments do we as humans want and how do we take all the many ethical, personal, social, sustainability, globalization, inclusivity etc. considerations into account that such developments bring with them?

The social-political perspective on Robots in Everyday Life addresses this question by exploring the transformational breadth of robots of today and of possible developments in the near future through a critical, transdisciplinary lens. This entails mapping the impact of AI-driven technologies, including robots, on our societies in terms of their en- and disabling effects for individual social agents as well as societies at large. Taking on the task of strengthening humanistic perspectives in the engineering of robotic technologies, we deliver both pathways for collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and pathways for qualifying societal debates on how to develop robots for human prosperity.