Feminist human-robot interaction: disentangling power, principles and practice for beter, more ethical HRI

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is inherently a human-centric feld of technology. The role of feminist theories in related felds (e.g. Human-Computer Interaction, Data Science) are taken as a starting point to present a vision for Feminist HRI which can support better, more ethical HRI practice everyday, as well as a more activist research and design stance. We frst defne feminist design for an HRI audience and use a set of feminist principles from neighboring felds to examine existent HRI literature, showing the progress that has been made already alongside some additional potential ways forward. Following this we identify a set of refexive questions to be posed throughout the HRI design, research and development pipeline, encouraging a sensitivity to power and to individuals' goals and values. Importantly, we do not look to present a defnitive, fxed notion of Feminist HRI, but rather demonstrate the ways in which bringing feminist principles to our feld can lead to better, more ethical HRI, and to discuss how we, the HRI community, might do this in practice.