# The Robot as a Document for Action: Materiality and Corporeality in the Info-Communicational Approach to Robots

Cécile Payeur, Béa Arruabarrena

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Cécile Payeur, Béa Arruabarrena. The Robot as a Document for Action: Materiality and Corporeality in the Info-Communicational Approach to Robots. Proceedings from the Document Academy, 2025, 12 (2), 10.35492/docam/12/2/13. hal-05521325

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# The Robot as a Document for Action: Materiality and Corporeality in the Info-Communicational Approach to Robots

Cécile Payeur

Université Paris Nanterre, DICEN IDF Laboratory, cecile.payeur@parisnanterre.fr

Béa Arruabarrena

CNAM, DICEN-IDF Laboratory, beatrice.arruabarrena@lecnam.net

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## Recommended Citation

Payeur, Cécile and Arruabarrena, Béa (2025) "The Robot as a Document for Action: Materiality and Corporeality in the Info-Communicational Approach to Robots," *Proceedings from the Document Academy*: Vol. 12 : Iss. 2, Article 9.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.35492/docam/12/2/13

Available at: https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/docam/vol12/iss2/9

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# The Robot as a Document for Action: Materiality and Corporeality in the Info-Communicational Approach to Robots

## Cover Page Footnote

This work was supported by the ANR (PEPR PC2 PI2-IMM Organic Robotics) under grant 22-EXOD-0003.
# 1. Emerging materialities of mediating artefacts

Since the turn of the 2000s, the transformation of documentary environments - marked by the increasing hybridization of digital and physical spaces (Jeanneret & Souchier, 2005) - has led some studies on the materiality of information technologies (Leonardi & Barley, 2008) to move beyond the traditional opposition between material and immaterial to grasp the complexity of contemporary mediations (Cotte, 2011). This involves considering communication “dispositifs” - within Foucault’s meaning of the term (Foucault, 1994) - in their full sociotechnical depth (Akrich, Callon & Latour, 2006) and their distributed materiality (Millerand and Bowker, 2009), while remaining attentive to the social and symbolic dimensions of info-communicational phenomena (Boczkowski & Lievrouw, 2008). Until now, these “pivot” documentary spaces, allowing access to documents in various formats (digital and/or paper) within the same physical space, took the form of transmedia artifacts (web sites or interactive kiosks, for example) (Payeur & Zacklad, 2007; Zacklad, 2012), whereas the recent deployment of collaborative robotics (cobots), as new mobile mediating artifacts which tend to interlock with bodies (exoskeletons, connected objects, for example), or/and physically alter the environment in which they operate (worker robots, for example), suggests the beginnings of a new form of corporeality in interactions, introducing unprecedented documentary materialities.

This reflection is part of our ongoing research within the Priority Research Program and Equipment for Organic Robotics (PEPR O2R), and more specifically the Interactive Mobile Manipulation (IMM)<fnref n="1" /> project, since 2024. This major eight-year French research program aims to stimulate reflections about the robots of the future, and in particular to imagine robots with new material properties, sometimes inspired by living organisms, that will be capable of acting within society. The idea is that machines, that were previously used in industry or in specialised fields (medical, etc.) by experts (engineers, technicians) with the technical skills to program them to repeat specific operations, will be able in the future to act safely in society, collaborating easily with humans in an unpredictable world where they will make decisions about their actions. Within this program, the IMM project is exploring more specifically the development of a robot that would take the form of a versatile interactive mobile manipulator, capable of moving around and navigating indoors and outdoors, and which would have two articulated arms.

One of the key challenges of this research program is the desire to bring together researchers in the humanities and social sciences, of which we are a part - researchers in information science, ergonomists, anthropologists and

<footnote n="1">¹ https://www.pepr-o2r.fr/projet/imm/</footnote>
sociologists, for example - and robotics researchers - whose specialities are as varied as those in the humanities - including mechanical and automation engineers, physicists, computer scientists, AI specialists, etc. Applications for these robots of the future are envisaged in the fields of healthcare and services, for example, but also in industrial and agricultural applications. In this context, our objective is to question how documentary materiality is embodied in robotic "dispositifs", as new hybrid info-communicational "dispositifs" grappling with artifacts exploiting this emerging materiality, composed notably of actor components, hardware, software, data, etc. These transformations profoundly change the way documents - including robots - are produced, used, and reinterpreted. The aim of this research is to model these processes to improve our understanding of documentation processes as knowledge systems and to support the social and prospective appropriation of robotic devices in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This paper proposes to go beyond traditional approaches in the field of HRI, which consider human-robot social interaction from perspectives centred either on humans or on robots - mainly in relation to their behaviour or cognitive aspects (Dautenhahn, 2007), and presents the results of an analysis of a robotic "dispositif" as a semiotic mediating artifact embedded in collective and collaborative practices as a Document for Action (DopA) (Zacklad, 2004). The proposed approach makes it possible to shift these points of view and consider the perspective of communicational transactions between actors, mediated by a robot-"dispositif" of a documentary type.

We consider different temporalities and spatialities to broadly explore information and communication “dispositifs” involving these artifacts based on a certain dimension of corporeality (associated with movements, particularly mobility and grasping...). We examine these documentation processes in three stages : documentarization, editorialisation and redocumentarization. In the first stage, the robot-“dispositif” is understood as a documentary inscription support that embeds codes, self-learning algorithms (machine learning), etc. In the second stage, we focus on the editorialization process, which concerns the operations that give a set of documentary fragments a coherence of genre, purpose, and positioning in a dissemination environment. This phase constitutes a bridge between design/documentation and appropriation/redocumentation, inscribing each robotic device in a determined genre and scripting its functions through documentation. In the third stage, we show that the robot is not a static documentary support, but in its usage dynamics, it becomes itself a producer of redocumentation. Each interaction with humans reconfigures the artifact, making the robot a continuously unfinished “document”.
## 2. Methodology of the research

The fields - in a wide sense - in which we deployed our “dispositif”- based approach as a framework for analysis were mainly robotics research laboratories, notably the robotics departments of LAAS-CNRS<fnref n="2" /> in Toulouse and INRAE<fnref n="3" /> in Clermont-Ferrand. We conducted two interviews with Nicolas Tricot, a research engineer working on the development of an experimental prototype, as part of an on-site observation and semi-structured interview carried out in November 2024 and July 2025, as well as two multidisciplinary workshops that we co-organised in Toulouse and Paris, France, in February<fnref n="4" /> and June 2025⁵. The workshops were based on co-design methodologies (Zacklad, Catoir-Brisson, 2021) and each included around twenty participants from the humanities and robotics fields. These workshops enabled us to collect various materials such as photographs, texts, videos and scripts co-produced by the participants.

First, it is necessary to clarify our approach to “robot” as a “dispositif”. One of the definitions proposed by robotics engineers to define a robot as a technical object is a mechanical machine that has two main characteristics: autonomy - it must be capable of reacting independently to what is happening (e.g. multifunctional kitchen appliance is not a robot) - and the ability to interact physically with its environment (e.g. hacking software and certain autonomous AI programmes are not robots). To do this, it must be able to move, scan its environment and interact (Cherubini, 2021). From this mechanical point of view, there are three essential components of the robots : sensors - which constantly provide it with data, information, etc. ; computers - electronic components and associated computer programmes, etc. ; and actuators - which vary in complexity and act in the physical world (hands, axes and grippers, wheels, legs, etc.). For our part, we adopt a wider view of the robot as a “dispositif”, in the socio-technical sense of the term, which includes the technical object itself, the actors, but also the associated data, algorithms, sensors-actuators, platforms, information flows, etc.

Here we can see examples of mobile robots that we were interested in, such as two robot prototypes developed by LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse : a humanoid robot and a robot that can prune vines. They are part of the new generation of cobots, already described by Dautenhahn in the early 2000s as “embodied, situated, surrounded by, responding to and interacting with its environment” (Dautenhah, 2007). Anthropomorphism is only applied for certain specific tests, such as

<footnote n="2">² https://www.laas.fr/fr/recherche/rob/</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ https://tscf.clermont.hub.inrae.fr/</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴https://www.pepr-o2r.fr/seminaires/retour-sur-la-journée-fabrique-de-linterdisciplinarite-robotique-shs/</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ https://www.pepr-o2r.fr/seminaires/la-fabrique-de-linterdisciplinarite-shs-roboticiens/</footnote>
linguistic interactions with AI [figure 1]. In other situations, this is not necessary
and the focus is on the robot's mobility and tooling functions [figure 2].

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. Humanoïd robot (LAAS-CNRS).</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. Vine-pruning robot (LAAS-CNRS).</figcaption></figure>

The third example [figure 3] shows a photo of an AgBot autonomous tractor
from AgXeed, presented at the World Fira 2025⁶ trade fair for agricultural robotics,
working in a field and capable of performing the same tasks as a traditional tractor
(sowing, plowing, decompacting, etc.). It is particularly useful for addressing
issues such as labour shortages and the physical demands of the work. It is
equipped with a lidar sensor that gives it a 3D view of its surroundings, enabling
it to detect obstacles and stop in an emergency (if a person or animal crosses its
path, for example). All they need to do is give it a starting point and an end point.
The robot is guided by GPS to navigate the field. The farmer must first configure
the robot by teaching it the contours of the field – a rough map is then generated
as an initial document – and this initial document will be refined and redefined as
the robot moves around the field.

<footnote n="6">⁶ https://world-fira.com/fr/agenda-fr/</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3. AgBot (AgXeed) at World Fira 2025.</figcaption></figure>

Within the framework of this robotic project, it seemed to us that the documentary approach could shed light on the ongoing reflections on the design of information and communication “dispositifs” that enable effective collaboration between humans and robots, in relation to the different materialities of mediating artefacts. The issue of documents has so far been largely overlooked in studies on robots and are generally approached from a communication perspective (Frijns et al., 2023). We believe that a detailed understanding of the documentary chain could enable us to improve future collaboration between humans and robots. We hypothesise that understanding the role of the robot as a mediating artefact of a documentary nature would allow for a better understanding – and design – of the collaborative logic in human-robot interactions. Our approach uses the Dopa methodological framework - Documents for Action - developed by Manuel Zacklad, in which he considers DopAs to be documents that provide ongoing support for cooperative transactions within a collective, with a permanent medium, characterised by prolonged or even intrinsic incompleteness, significant fragmentation and a complex distribution of contributions from writers and readers (Zacklad, 2004). The challenge is twofold : to mobilise this theoretical framework to analyse our field, it means to use an existing analytical grid to better understand the dimensions of communication between actors without neglecting documentary and informational issues, but perhaps also to contribute in the long term to the evolution of the theory of Documents for Action in relation to increasingly complex technical objects. There is a dual level to what we are trying to do : analyse our field with a documentary analysis grid and, at the same time, reflect on the constitution of this grid and its possible evolutions.
### 3. Toward “moving” Documents for Action

The theoretical framework of DoPAs developed by Manuel Zacklad in the early 2000s allows us to take into account the fragmentary aspects of the document in the construction of a common meaning. From this point of view, we consider the robot here as a documentary “dispositif” that supports collective activity. The main characteristics of the Document in a vision that supports collective action are, as defined by Manuel Zacklad: prolonged incompleteness, permanence, fragmentation, non-trivial relationship with the creators, non-trivial argumentative relationship with other parts of the document (Zacklad, 2004, 2007). He identifies three dimensions for analyzing the process at work, which we consider here as an analytical framework for the robot as “dispositif” - and whose relevance we will ultimately be able to question :

- Firstly, documentarization as “semiotic production (content) transcribed or recorded on a durable medium equipped with specific attributes (i.e., documented) aimed at facilitating practices related to its subsequent use in the context of preserving distributed communication transactions” (Zacklad, 2004),

- Then a process of editorialization: “editorialization is therefore a type of documentation aimed at giving genre coherence to a set of documentary fragments or to several documents within the framework of a collection, a portal, a website, a blog…” (Zacklad, 2004). It involves different types of mediations: authorial (the author's work on the medium to give it internal coherence), editorial (classification within a genre and a collection), diffusion (aimed at facilitating physical access and marketing), and appropriation (produced by readers-annotators),

- And finally, a process of re-documentarization that “involves re-documenting a document or collection, allowing a beneficiary to rearticulate the semiotic content according to their interpretation and uses, both internally (extracting musical pieces to rearrange them with others, or annotations in the margins of a book suggesting different reading paths...) or external (organizing a collection, archive, or private catalog combining resources from different publishers according to a new logic of association)” (Zacklad, 2004).

The first dimension of analysing the robot as a Document for Action is documentarization. In the case of our agricultural robots, we see that documents are continuously generated throughout the robot's life cycle. Four types of documents are particularly noteworthy here :

- In the initial design phase of the technical object, we find the classic engineering documents, which remain available for consultation at all
stages of the robot's life : specifications, functional and technical
specifications, 3D CAD models (Catia), etc. These technical documents
contribute to the physical assembly of the artifact and enable it to adapt to
and evolve within its environment : it can be the choice of 4x4 wheels for
difficult terrain, combustion engine for longer autonomy on a large field to
be plowed, low center of gravity for sloping terrain, arm capable of
detecting obstacles (lidar), appropriate actuator (sprayer), adapted software
components (APIs that retrieve information), for example.

- The crucial safety aspect is ensured by a number of established regulatory documents (standards), algorithms process information with varying degrees of precision depending on the sensitivity of the sensors, and whose reaction speed is essential (for example, the robot must stop immediately if an obstacle appears at a certain distance from it). Standardized safety protocols accompany the use of the robot, and safety data sheets are shared between different users of the same type of robot, etc.

- Similarly, the open-source software and languages used to programme robots (Python, ROS) enable robotics engineers to openly share these numerous standardised documents on forums and exchange platforms.

- Finally, one of the main challenges of mobile robotics, localisation, is supported by a continuous documentarization process. Robotics engineers explain that it is impossible for a mobile robot to know where it is (Cherubini, 2021). It is guided by a control loop and continuously receives data from sensors, which enable it to locate itself. Knowing where it is comes naturally to us, but it is very complicated for a robot, which must continuously produce maps, locate itself and navigate (to move from point A to point B without causing an accident). These three components are linked, and localization is fundamental - it needs to locate itself in order to map and navigate. These three essential robot operations continuously produce documents, which feed into each other, some of which will have legal value in the event of a problem (evidential value).

The second dimension of analysis is that of editorialization, as a type of documentation aimed at giving genre coherence to a set of documentary fragments. This involves different types of mediation, for which we have proposed definitions with Manuel Zacklad (Zacklad, 2004; Payeur & Zacklad, 2007; Payeur, 2010):

- Authorial mediation, which enables the creation of documents by and for different actors/authors, such as robotics engineers, farmers, maintenance technicians, safety experts, insurers, health authorities, etc.

- Editorial mediation is involved in the design of different interfaces and the arrangement of data, giving rise to a specific genre of robot (e.g., agricultural, medical, logistics, service, etc.).
- Finally, diffusion-type mediation occurs when robotic data is transformed into usable information according to different user profiles (for example, task planning calendar, supervision, as can be seen with INRAE's SuperRob project, etc.)

These different types of documentary mediations lead us to consider the robot as a meta-document adapted to a multitude of uses.

Finally, we analyze what is happening in terms of redocumentarization, it means, a new documentation process that allows semiotic content to be rearticulated according to usage:

- First, we observe a variety of “data sensor” mediating artifacts: future “dispositifs” will include fleets of robots, rather than a single robot, sometimes associated with other robots such as drones, which communicate with each other and send additional information, for example on the state of crops or fields.

- There is a permanent capture and re-injection of data (via capture loops) that allows each situation to be recorded and learned from, and even simulated at a later date : data sets, data lakes, AI algorithms, classification, metadata, video streams (cameras), .bag files, etc.

- This data is cross-referenced and classified, linked as metadata to other elements (such as a situation). It constitutes a memory for action and learning in context. For example, a robot that helps prune vines can build up a documentary memory including photos, weather information, and notes on algorithms, which make it possible to remember the actions carried out on the vines the previous year and, in the field, to prune the vines in the most appropriate way possible the following year.

In a sense, the robot acts as a sensor containing data from the physical world, enabling learning through the regeneration of Documents for Action. Its embodied and autonomous nature leads it to act in the world in physical space, constantly being renewed. Considering the robot as a “moving” Document for Action leads us to take into account both the dimensions of documentary fragmentation and the continuous generation of documents resulting from these movements on the outside world - for which new perspectives are opening up with future generations of robots to come, inspired by movements from art or living organisms (Abe, 2022).
4. Conclusion and perspectives

This initial analysis already reveals an initial paradox : on the one hand, we have
reference documents that are increasingly integrated throughout the phases and
deadlines of the project, for the safe use of robots in society, and on the other hand,
we are faced with an exponentially incomplete hyper-fragmentation of
documentation generated by the specific nature of the robot-“dispositif”.
Consequently, we believe it is necessary to take into account the complexity and
articulation of these fragments in the documentary chain by integrating an analysis
in terms of mediation and documentary production from the system design stage
onwards, particularly in order to assist collectives involved in HRI design. The
challenge is even higher in a context where various actors interact with robotic
artifacts that, while physically modifying their environment autonomously,
simultaneously capture data flows that continuously generate new documentary
productions. This dual nature of robots - physical agents and informational
sensors - creates an unprecedented situation where every gesture, every movement,
every action simultaneously produces a material transformation and a digital trace.
This continuously collected data enables automatic learning, thus constituting a
wealth of potential documents that can be mobilized, reinterpreted, and reused in
other contexts. Thus, human-robot collaboration is not limited to the occasional
coordination of actions, but is part of a complex documentary ecology.

We believe this approach is central to the challenges of the PEPR Organic Robotics project, as it would enable us to move beyond the traditional socio-technical perspective of human-robot interactions and focus on the transactional and communicational dimensions, which are often neglected in highly technical projects. Indeed, while traditional approaches tend to focus on the ergonomic and functional aspects of the human-robot interface, Dopa's transactional analysis allows us to grasp the dynamics of conversation, negotiation, and meaning construction that occur within these interactions of design and use in robotics. It is precisely in the subtlety of these semiotic analyses - which seek to decode the documentary mediations generated by and within these collaborations - that it will be possible to better understand and design human-robot collaboration in its materiality and corporeality.

This research also opens up new theoretical perspectives on the need to
develop existing theoretical frameworks in order to grasp the complexity of these
new information and communication “dispositifs” and to fully integrate their
relationship to the materiality of the world. Traditional conceptual models, often
focused on purely informational interactions or static artifacts, struggle to account
for the specificity of these hybrid systems that combine computation, physical
action, and document production. The aim is therefore to develop theoretical
approaches capable of capturing the performative dimension of the documents generated by robots in action, their role in the configuration of workspaces, and their contribution to the collective organization of activity. This theoretical evolution could also make it possible to take into account the ethical issues raised by these "dispositifs", particularly in terms of the distribution of agency, responsibility, and governance.

## Acknowledgements

This work was supported by ANR (PEPR PC2 PI2-IMM Organic Robotics) under grant 22-EXOD-0003.

A special thank you to all the members of the PEPR O2R research program, especially to Andrea Cherubini and Philippe Fraisse, who are leading the IMM project, to the LAAS-CNRS laboratory, to Manuel Zacklad for the exchanges about the DoPA and to Nicolas Tricot from the INRAE for sharing with us his knowledge about robotic supervision.

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