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At a Robot Competition with my Children

It’s 8am on a quiet Sunday morning in Sydney. I am herding 5 excited
youngsters and 3 boxes of ‘bits’ through an unknown university to a
‘robot competition’. Nothing is open and the thoughtful trail of signs dries
up. In the distance, I spot other youngsters wearing uniforms and carrying
signs and pom poms.
It’s one of my first robot competitions. When I’ve found our workspace
and fought for powerpoints, I ask one of the helpful people in white coats
(‘just ask us anything’) where to find a cup of coffee. She turns out to be
the Asia-Pacific managing director of the global company sponsoring the
event. As she only flew into Sydney that morning, with the big welcome
banner in her cabin baggage, she apologises for not knowing where to
get coffee yet. She keeps checking on my coffee levels through the day,
and indeed at every event I’ve met her at since then.
I am a ‘good coach’, not a ‘bad parent’ with my hands resolutely off their
robots and programs. This competition is for fun, to foster a love of
science, engineering and a global community of knowledge sharing. Even
when it hurts, when your kids are in third place and pull their robot apart
minutes before the finals. I notice some adults slaving away over laptops
while their kids look on. That’s not in the spirit of the competition agree
the organisers. Many of the rules are explicit. There are pages and pages
of explicit rules and guidelines. But many of the rules are not.  

About Robot Competitions:

Science competitions may seem unsporting but it turns out there a many of them. A

quick category search on Wikipedia shows 61 pages tagged as a ‘science competition’.

While this includes the DARPA grand challenge, the richest robotics competition, with

$2 million for the first placed autonomous vehicle, the list doesn’t include the 3 major

robot competitions that I am entering teams in this year, X Prize, First Lego League and

RoboCup. Although I enter teams of primary school students in the increasingly popular

‘junior’ divisions, robot competitions are a branch of science competitions primarily

aimed at stimulating research and sometimes also of sharing knowledge in their field.

There is a significant history of scientific breakthroughs as a result of public

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challenges or races, as Alan Newell, an early AI pioneer said at the opening of the CMU

Robotics Institute in 1980. It might start as engineering but on the way it becomes

science. One way of moving science forward is basically through building stuff and

seeing what happens (or doesn’t). This legitimises the game or toy approach beloved of

roboticists, although the link is correlative rather than necessarily causative.

R. Steven Rainwater has been maintaining a listing of robot competitions since

1996, which is currently at robots.net. There are 123 events listed for the 12 months

from April 2010, and that doesn’t include the X Prize series. In 2005, Richard Balogh

published a survey of competitions, in which he classified the different types as;

navigational, duels, crusades or miscellaneous (for the hard to categorise exceptions).

Navigation was one of the first ‘official’ robotics competitions in 1979, ‘The

Amazing Micromouse Maze Contest’ was held during the national computer conference

in New York. Typically these competitions involve mazes, linefollowing, climbing or

other modes of movement in a strictly defined environment. Duels are more

‘sophisticated’ as Balogh describes them, more attractive, not just for the public but for

the challenge to roboticists. These are the sporty competitions, like sumo, hockey and

the various very popular robosoccer leagues, in which a defined environment has

changing conditions like the opponents or the ball. (Balogh, 2005)

Leaving aside the miscellaneous category, the final major competition type is the

‘crusade’, like DARPA, X PRIZE and RoboRescue, in which robots have to solve a real

life scenario in a dynamic environment. Crusade style competitions are purposeful. Semi

autonomous robots are already being used for reconnaissance, disaster & earthquake

relief, fire-fighting, gas leaks, sewer pipe maintenance, mine and bomb removal.

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Controlled robots have been used in manufacturing, mining and agriculture for 30 years

now. The US Dept of Defence recently set a target that 33% of military vehicles would

be driverless by 2015, hence DARPA’s Grand Challenge in 2004, 2007 and 2008. South

Korea aim to have domestic robots in every home by 2020, which is plausible for a

country with a proven record in being at the forefront of technological change. By 2005,

South Korea had provided high speed internet access to 80% of population, with plans

to increase that to 1Gb/s by 2012.

Robot Soccer really kicked off at the ‘Workshop on Grand Challenges in Artificial

Intelligence’ in October, 1992 in Tokyo, although research with soccer playing robots

was being conducted independently in some labs around the world, like Alan

Mackworth, University of British Colombia, Manuela Velosa, Carnegie Mellon, Minoru

Asada, Osaka University. The launch of the Japanese ‘J-League’ resulted in so many

international requests for inclusion that a World Cup was proposed in 1993. Robot

soccer became the hot topic at AI/Robotics conferences until the first official World Cup,

held in Nagoya in 1997. (Robocup.org)

Co-chair of RoboCup 2009, Gerald Steinbauer, told CNN this

year’s event was the 13th edition of the cup, and he was
impressed by progress by advances since the competitions
began. “At the last RoboCup in China 2008 we had games of
teams of three humanoid playing attractive soccer. They walk
on two feet, fight for the ball and of course score... so we are
approaching the goal,” he said. Culverhouse said interest in
both events had steadily grown, especially since the two-
legged robots had been introduced. This year up to 3,000
competitors from 40 countries are expected at RoboCup.
from CNN: March 26 2009 “Soccer Robots Being Built to Beat Humans”
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SPORT/football/03/25/robot.football/
 

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There is already one big goal in robot soccer. It is ‘to beat the best human team in

the 2050 World Cup’. Robot soccer is not yet the richest robot competition but is

increasingly the public face of robotics. While ‘rescue’ competitions have obvious social

benefits and military applications, the popularity and appeal of robot soccer lies in the

symbolic meanings and social relations that position this cultural object in our society.

Using Griswold’s cultural diamond analogy, we can examine the production and

reception of robot soccer competitions within the particular cultural context, recognising

that each of these four factors has an impact on the others, which corresponds to

Wajcman & Mackenzie’s social shaping of technology approach, and Wajcman’s

‘technofeminism’ in which technology and gender are involved in co-production. Both

are derived in part from the Durkheimian thinking of culture as a ‘collective product or

representation, rather than as exclusively the work of individual creators’. (McNeely

1996)

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This theoretical approach binds together again the dichotomies of culture and mass

culture, consumer culture and individual consumption, in a post postmodern fashion, by

situating an individual’s acts of choice or identity play within a social framework, rather

than looking along class lines or for psychological factors. Analyses of subcultures are

important here for describing the ways in which hegemonic meanings are reproduced. A

subculture is not always deviant in a normless, negative, reactionary or counterculture

way, as described in Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style. (1979). Subculture

correlates with Tonnies’ description of a community (Gemeinschaft) which is

welcoming, compared to a society (Gesellschaft) in which you are alone (1887). Gelder

describes how Tonnies juxtaposes community and society in contrast to Adorno who

juxtaposes massification with individuality and that Tonnies description not only

prefigures subcultures but social framing approaches (Gelder & Thornton 2005).

In this introductory paper, I am describing ‘robocup subculture’. The emergence of

a community, bound together through a cultural object, the robot soccer competition.

This community is predominantly masculine, which reflects the broader community of

science and technology. Gender relations are continually being reproduced. The

symbolic value of cultural objects like the robot soccer competitions, and the humanoid

robots that feature, are unconsciously utilised to maintain an ideology. As Althusser says,

ideology is the unconscious structure that we inhabit giving us the illusion of control,

‘the representation of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real conditions

of existence’ (1970 p153).

The robocup subculture could evoke many descriptions. It could be considered a

thinking man’s muscle culture, a war game, a fetish, toys for boys, tech porn, and a

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substitution for human society. In reality, however, most descriptions are uncritically

flattering. The public reputation of robot competitions is of good, clean, productive,

innovative, ungendered fun. I make this point not to disparage the robot competitions,

rather to point out the way in which their discourse is constructed. In ‘Encoding,

Decoding’, Stuart Hall describes 3 positions available within ideology for the production

and reception of meaning. The dominant-hegemonic position or transparent ‘norm’, the

oppositional code and the negotiated code, which operates with contradictory logics,

supporting the norm but making its own ground rules (1977, 1980, 1993).

The robocup subculture appears at first to be operating as a negotiated position

within patriarchal society. All the participants that I have discussed gender with express

their belief in gender equality and their rejection of ‘typical’ masculinity. They are all

perplexed as to why so few women are involved but point to the token women present

as proof that times are a changing. Also that if times aren’t changing, then there is

nothing inherently gendered about the situation, so there must be something wrong with

the women. This is the view frequently expressed to me by the few women in the

robotics field, who will, however, all admit to individual discrete gender issues.

I would argue that the reality is closer to Hall’s meta position, the ‘professional’,

which could be called a fourth position rather than a subcategory of the dominant-

hegemonic. This ‘professional’ position utilises a ‘metacode’ to allow the reproduction of

dominant ideology overlaid with a critical distancing. This position does not change or

challenge the dominant position and given the increased authority evoked by the

‘professional’ distance, arguably does more to support the ideology than any ‘norm’.

Hall goes on to say that ‘professional codes serve to reproduce hegemonic definitions

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specifically by not overtly biasing their operations in a dominant direction’ (Hall 1993

p101).

While Hall was primarily describing the role of broadcasters, journalists and the

producers of mass media, this is directly applicable to scientists who are the producers

of mass epistemology - a description which uses Althusser’s ideology as language to

fertilize Latour’s missing masses. Within this cultural diamond, I am outlining how the

robocup subculture transparently reproduces patriarchy or gender power relations by the

enacting of ‘heroic masculinity in everyday consumption’ (Holt & Thompson 2004).

Analyses have been done on the relations between gender and science, computing,

computer games, internet, technology, engineering and business cultures. Arguably that

is looking too far backwards. The technologies of tomorrow are being built now in

research labs. They are gendered by default if not by design.

Introducing the Competitors:

I have collected some photos from robocup events, from university directories and from

media representations. What was striking was how gendered engineering directories are.

All staff and students are gendered by photo and/or title whenever a department goes to

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the trouble of maintaining a directory. This fortuitously allowed me to do a fairly

accurate citation analysis for gender from the most recent ACRA2009 conference. Of the

131 authors indexed in the ACRA proceedings, 115 were male, 11 were female and I

was unable to resolve 5 names, however distributing those numbers to the ratio evident,

female participation is between 8 - 9%.

At a Robotics Conference with Claude & Chris

I attended the 2009 Australasian Conference on Robotics & Automation

at University of Sydney to see first hand what the local situation was. After
all, if I’m teaching girls robotics, what does the future really hold for them?
The male atmosphere rather overwhelmed me. The only women in the room
were administrators handing out badges and serving coffee. I already felt like
an outsider just by being a non-roboticist, but I’d brought along a bonafide
(male) native for moral support.
I was assured that a well known female roboticist was going to be there
later and I discovered a female student lurking in the stairwell. I counted
approx 100 men present and saw only 3 or 4 bonafide female roboticists.
Everyone assured me that there are more women around… Somewhere…
I had a good conversation, over coffee, with the head of an engineering
department, who agreed that lack of women must be a structural issue but
his initiatives didn’t work and he was unsupported, especially by the only
woman in his department, which made him question the relevance of
politically motivated gender equities.
The students around felt that ‘lowering standards’ just to let women in
was insulting everyone’s intelligence, especially that of women who had
already successfully competed on a level playing field, when I mentioned
affirmative action.

Another noticeable feature is that when being photographed for display purposes,

the women are always at the front of the photo, but are in the background in candid

shots. Which reflects my experience at the ACRA2009 conference. When there are

women present, they seem much less noticeable than the actual numbers recorded,

which suggests that some camouflage behavior is at work.

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A typical robotics department (University of Munich). Something else I’ve noticed

is the preponderance of beards or long hair on the men – tied back to avoid industrial

hazards. Although the higher your standard in the department is, the less hair you have.

The next 3 pages of pictures show recent robotics competition winners receiving their

trophies. Those pictures are followed by media representations of the ‘Grand Challenge’

robotics teams followed by team’s about to compete in a humanoid soccer league.

The robot competitors themselves have ‘evolved’. The initial competitors were

small round robots, like the Roomba pictured. This evolution is worth an analysis. The

swarm bots or insectile robots were superseded by the AIBO dogs, which have been

replaced by the humanoid NAO. This is not just because moving on 2 legs is very hard

to do and it’s taken a while to work it out. Each evolution is seen as more desirable and

popular. The humanoid NAO is also very masculine for an ‘ungendered’ object.

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The robot soccer competitions at the heart of the robocup subculture are a

deployment of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption, as described by Holt and

Thompson (2004). Men create symbolic meaning and drama out of their movement

between the ‘breadwinner’ and the ‘rebel’ myths, in a way that enacts the quintessential

rational man myth, the ‘cowboy’. The cowboy makes his own rules or laws. He comes

from a state of disorder, over which he has mastery through his natural ability and

developed skills. Cawelti describes the cowboy as the most enduring and fundamental

myths of modern society as a meditation on the morality of violence (1975). He imposes

law and order over only those domains that ask for it because the cowboy is an

individual with no interest in social control, only justice, freedom and equality for all -

the myths of rationalism, limited government and the marketplace. The cowboy is

business before it becomes a bureaucracy. The cowboy is innovation.

It’s very possible that robotics and AI are about to spark a technological revolution

on par with the development of computers and the internet. The first computer was built

in the 40s, the first computer network in the 60s, computers were not moved out of

research and into commerce as the personal computer reached affordability in 1997

with what Byte magazine called ‘the Trinity’; the Apple II, the PET 2001 and the TRS-80.

And then the internet became ‘public’ and commercial in the late 80s. Technology that

had been in research or research applications for 40 years seemed to appear by magic.

Becoming commonplace ironically causes an exponential increase in the amount of

innovation and change occurring around the technology.

Predictions or challenges like RoboCup’s ‘2050 world beating team’ or South

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Korea’s ‘robot in every home by 2020’ are just guesses of where robotics might go. The

‘killer app’ is probably not robot soccer but we’ll only know it in hindsight. In the same

way that we can know recognise that spreadsheets and home desktop printing made

personal computers desirable and email was the ‘must have’ for the internet.

This grand endeavor forms the backdrop for enactment of heroic masculinity. In

Holt & Thompson, and earlier readings of masculinity and work, by Ehrenreich, Kimmel

and Mitchell (Holt & Thompson 2004) the underlying thesis is ‘that the gap between the

atavistic ideal masculinity and the modern breadwinner role produces an identity crisis

that men have tried to resolve through consumption’. This situates consumption in

opposition to work, as a leisure activity and an escape from the breadwinner role.

Traditionally viewed as weekday breadwinner, weekend rebel/warrior, Holt &

Thompson have constructed a richer description of the many ways that men cycle

between both in consumption as drama. Drama which is both satisfying, stimulating and

‘a fundamental component of all social action’ (2004 p438) according to many theorists

from literature, to anthropology to sociology. Holt & Thompson describe this drama as

self created as much as scripted externally (competitions) and say that the ‘American

ideology of heroic masculinity presents men with a dialectical invitation to dramatic self-

constructions’, working with the most mundane materials (while I’m not saying robots

are mundane, shopping at Dick Smith certainly is), men are able to cultivate a sense that

important matters are afoot and success is vital, even when no real danger exists.

Holt & Thompson describe how the mass culture discourse, which produces the

‘semiotic raw ingredients that consumers draw upon to construct their identities’ may be

powerful, but it is never determining and that masculinity (and subcultures) are

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constructed in the intersection with the ‘socially situated consumption practices’. Holt &

Thompson move beyond the postmodern rhetoric of consumption as an individual

action, creative identity play and the narrative of self, none of which adequately explain

the impact of economics, class and social structure. They describe the social structure as

a frame, which can proscribe or promote seemingly random individual practises.

The breadwinner model is grounded in the American myth of success (Cawelti

1989, Holt & Thompson 2004). The competitive will to succeed has to operate in the

business and corporate space. The breadwinner is the paragon of family values and a

pillar of the community. They sacrifice themselves for others, family, community and

company or team. This ‘subordination’ undermines the success, winner, self

aggrandising, so the negativity is repressed, failed, cowardly or broken.

The rebel model is the untamed individual, charismatic and threatening.

Epitomising early values of the America, the Enlightenment and rational man but unable

to combine them harmoniously with others, the rebels negative values are immaturity,

violence or irrelevance.

The man-of-action draws on the best of both models and is exemplified by the

cowboy myth. The cowboy myth was born out of the Enlightenment, via the American

and French Revolution, Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Jefferson, Rousseau and the Romantics

and symbolizes the movement away from religious authority but reluctance to empower

the secular. (Wright 2001, Holt & Thompson 2004)

In the robotics competition subculture, work is play. It can become is a whole of

life occupation/identity, neatly combining mass culture discourse and everyday

consumption practice. The roboticist cycles between the rule breaking, long haired
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hobbyist with unique ideas, to the rule making peer citing professional success. The

roboticist is continually creating man-of-action dramas as ‘he’ builds his ‘men-of-action’.

The roboticist resolves all dramas successfully in his favour. Masculinity is saved by the

robot.

I would like analyse this more fully in the future by examining the symbolic

meaning of each component of this robocup subculture, robots, soccer and competition.

Each of these facets of the whole adds an interesting perspective to the construction of

gendered social relations, both now and future. Robotics reflects the production of

another species in our masculine image, rather than exploring the alien or other beings.

Soccer is a non American symbol of globalisation and again produces masculinity

through a rhetoric of liberal neutrality. And the role of competition in an academic

environment is also full of ideology masked in the ‘scholastic point of view’ as Bourdieu

described in his theory of social (scientific) capital. Studies on the role of academic

citations and ranking seem relevant to the conversion of research to sport.

Introducing the real challenge:

Evelyn Fox Keller tells that when one of her professors heard that she was writing

about gender and science, he said: ‘So what is it you’ve learned about women in

science?’ highlighting how gender is seen as a women’s issue rather than something that

affects everyone and that science is seen to be a universal truth with a ‘woman problem’

rather than something potentially missing out on a whole range of practise (Sarzin 1996).

Judy Wajcman describes the evolution of feminist theories of technology and science,

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from the pessimism of the second wave of feminism, which emphasised the role of

technology in reproducing patriarchy, to the unfounded optimism of the post-feminist

90s, which saw liberation in technology into a more recent ‘technofeminism’ that

emphasises mutual shaping. This fits with a subculture analysis of robot soccer

competitions as a Durkheimian collective consciousness.

Liberal feminists of the 70s and 80s focussed on the way femininity was

constructed and women prevented from taking up roles in maths, science and

technology. Technology itself was framed as neutral and the issues were political and

social, which would be fixed by equal opportunities, rights and encouragement. Radical

feminists offered a deeper understanding of the embedding of gender power relations but

perpetuated an essentialist and pessimistic view. Socialist feminism (Cockburn,

Wajcman, McNeil) looked at the machinery of production and the division of labour,

and saw social relations materialised in tools and techniques, (artefacts were not neutral

or value free.) “Technology was socially shaped but shaped by men to the exclusion of

women.” (Wajcman, 2007)

The question as Sally Wyatt puts it was ‘whether women experienced technology

as oppressive because men dominated its use or whether technology was inherently

patriarchal’. (2008)

Plant and Haraway embraced the positive liberating potential of technology,

however the new postfeminist ‘imaginary’ while refreshingly different from the ‘material

reality’ of the existing technological order, has still failed to materialise in significant

change for women or in consumption practices, rather exaggerating existing inequalities.

This lack of materiality is addressed in ‘technofeminism’ where Wajcman calls for

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a political response to a technological society, similarly to Latour who describes

technology as ‘politics pursued by other means’ (Latour 1983).

My fear is that we simply can’t keep up with cultural changes. As fast as one

imaginary is critiqued another has materialized. Feminism, Science and Technology

Studies, Cultural Theory and Political Theory are no match for engineering departments

composed of crouching men, hidden women. Even if the ‘social meanings of technology

are contingently stabilised and contestable, that the fate of a technology depends on

many social factors that cannot simply be read off fixed sets of power arrangements’.

(Wajcman 2007)

“Drawing more women into design - the configuration of artefacts - is not only an

equal employment opportunities issue but is also crucially about how the world we live

in is designed, and for whom.” (Wajcman, 2007) How are we producing our future

culture and how are we producing the future engineers of our future culture?

I always wanted to be an
astronaut but at the time
NASA wouldn’t take women
who weren’t fighter pilots.
And women couldn’t be
fighter pilots, when I was
10. In some ways, I still
have my nose pressed up
against the window of a
myth that is not for me.

 
From Sydney Padua’s “Lovelace &
Babbage” at 2DGoggles.com

Bibliography:

Althusser, L. 1970, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, first published in La Pensee.

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Balogh, R. 2005 ‘A Survey of Robotic Competitions’ International journal of Advanced Robotic Systems,
vol. 2 no. 2, viewed 5 June 2010, <http://sciyo.com/journals/volume/issn/1729-8806/volume/2/number/2>

Bourdieu, P. 1998, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford University Press, Stanford,
California

Cawelti, J. G. 1975, ‘Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture’, Critical Inquiry

Cawelti, J. G. 1965, Apostles of the Self-Made Man, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Gelder, K. & Thornton, S. (eds), 1997, The Subcultures Reader, Routledge, London

Griswold, W. 1994, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks
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Hebdige, D. 1979, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Methuen & Co. Ltd. London

Holt, D.B. & Thompson, C.J. 2004 ‘Man-of-Action Heroes: The Pursuit of Heroic Masculinity in Everyday
Consumption’, Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 31.

Latour, Bruno. 1983, ‘Give Me A Laboratory and I Will Raise the World’, Science Observed: perspectives
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latour.fr/articles/article/12-GIVE%20ME%20A%20LAB.pdf>

MacKenzie, Donald & Wajcman, Judy (eds.) 1985, The Social Shaping of Technology: How the
Refrigerator Got Its Hum Milton Keynes, Open University Press.

McGray, D. 2004, The Great Robot Race, Wired Magazine Issue 12.03, viewed on 9 June 2010
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/robot.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=>

McNeely, C. 1996, ‘Understanding Culture in a Changing World’, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular
Culture, vol. 4, no. 1,

History of RoboCup viewed June 1 2010 at <http://www.robocup.org>

Robot Contests and Competitions FAQ from R. Steven Rainwater viewed June 1 2010 at
<http://robots.net/rcfaq.html>

Sarzin, A. 1996, Evelyn Fox Keller: Templeton lecture downloaded on 12 February 2010 from
<http://www.wisenet-australia.org/ISSUE42/keller.htm >

Science Competitions from Wikipedia viewed June 3 2010 from

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Science_competitions>

Steere, M. 2009. Soccer Robots Being Built to Beat Humans, CNN.com/World Sport, viewed 6 June 2010
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<http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SPORT/football/03/25/robot.football/>

Survey and Inventory of Current Efforts in Comparative Robotics Research, European Robotics Research
Network, viewed 5 June 2010 <http://www.robot.uji.es/EURON/en/soccer.htm>

Tonnies, F, 1887, 2001, Community and Society Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Wajcman, J. 2007, ‘From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience’, Information,

Communication & Society, vol. 10. no. 3.

Wright, W. 2001. The Wild West: the mythical cowboy and social theory Sage Publications, London

Wyatt, S. 2008, ‘Feminism, Technology and the Information Society’, Information, Communication &

Society, vol. 11. no. 1.

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