Thorsten Gruber
Papers
7
Total Citations
2,815
H-Index
5
About
Thorsten Gruber is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of service management, robotics, and artificial intelligence, whose work has fundamentally shaped how academics and practitioners understand the integration of technology into service environments. Best known for his landmark 2018 paper "Brave New World: Service Robots in the Frontline," which has accumulated an extraordinary 2,082 citations, Gruber helped establish service robotics as a serious field of scholarly inquiry by drawing compelling parallels between today's AI-driven transformation and the Industrial Revolution. His subsequent systematic literature review on service robots, customers, and employees (2020, 541 citations) provided the field with an essential roadmap for future research, identifying critical knowledge gaps that continue to guide scholars worldwide. More recently, Gruber has turned his attention to the ethical dimensions of autonomous systems, proposing new accountability frameworks for AI robots in his 2022 work addressing pressing concerns around driverless vehicles, care robotics, and autonomous weaponry. Throughout his career, he has also championed consumer-centric methodologies — including laddering interviews and value-dominant logic perspectives — to better understand how users perceive and interact with robots. Gruber's body of work represents a rare combination of theoretical rigor and real-world relevance.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Brave new world: service robots in the frontline2,082 citations · 2018
- 2
- 3The Dawn of the AI Robots: Towards a New Framework of AI Robot Accountability118 citations · 2022
- 4
- 5
- 6Investigating User Perceptions of HRI4 citations · 2015
- 7