Computer Sciences Professor Bilge Mutlu's work on organizational use of robots was featured in NewScientist in December: "Learning to love to hate robots."
The article was based on an ethnographic study of how a delivery robot was used in a hospital and how the workflow, social, emotional and organizational factors affected its use.
The work highlighted the need to design appropriate "social behaviors" for robots that use human physical and social features such as speech and free-form navigation.
The academic publication on the results of this work was also awarded Best Paper at last year's Human-Robot Interaction Conference.
The hospital robot's producer, Aethon, Inc. is using these findings to improve the robot's design.
Mutlu is continuing this line of work towards a better understanding of how autonomous computing systems should be designed to better fit the human social and physical environment.