Under framings of grand challenges, robotics has been proposed as a solution to a wide range of societal issues such as road safety, ageing society, economic productivity and climate change. However, what exactly is robotics research? From its inception, robotics has been an inherently interdisciplinary field, bringing together diverse domains such as engineering, cognitive science, computer science and, more recently, knowledge from social sciences and humanities. Previous research on interdisciplinarity shows that this mode of knowledge production is often driven by societal concerns and political choices. The politics of who gets to make these choices and on what terms is the focus of empirical research in this paper. Using a novel mixed-method approach combining bibliometrics, desk-based analysis and fieldwork, this article builds a narrative of interdisciplinarity at the UK’s largest public robotics lab, the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. This paper argues for the recognition of the plural ways of knowing interdisciplinarity. From citation analysis, through tracing of the emerging fields and disciplines, to, finally, the investigation of researchers’ experiences; each method contributes a distinct and complementary outlook on “what robotics is made of”. While bibliometrics allows visualising prominent disciplines and keywords, document analysis reveals influential and missing stakeholders. Meanwhile, fieldwork explores the logics underpinning robotics and identifies the capabilities necessary to perform the research. In doing so, the paper synthesises plural ways of locating politics in interdisciplinary research and provides recommendations for enabling “structural preparedness for interdisciplinarity”.

在严峻挑战的框架下，人们提出了机器人技术来解决各种社会问题，例如道路安全，社会老龄化，经济生产力和气候变化。但是，机器人技术到底是什么？从一开始，机器人技术就已经成为一个固有的跨学科领域，它将诸如工程，认知科学，计算机科学以及最近来自社会科学和人文科学的知识等多种领域融合在一起。以前关于跨学科的研究表明，这种知识生产模式通常是由社会关注和政治选择驱动的。谁来做出这些选择以及选择什么术语的政治是本文研究的重点。使用结合了文献计量学，基于案头的分析和现场调查的新颖混合方法，本文构建了英国最大的公共机器人实验室布里斯托尔机器人实验室的跨学科叙述。本文主张认识到跨学科性的多种方式。从引文分析到对新兴领域和学科的追踪，再到对研究人员经验的调查；每种方法在“机器人由什么构成”方面都具有独特而互补的观点。文献计量学可以可视化突出的学科和关键词，而文档分析则可以揭示有影响力和缺失的利益相关者。同时，现场工作探索了支持机器人技术的逻辑，并确定了进行研究所需的能力。在这样做，