Abstract

Robots are moving from factories and warehouses into the streets, sidewalks, and shared public spaces of cities, and Dubai Silicon Oasis (DSO) is at the forefront of this shift in the Gulf region. Through the Talabat ‘talabot’ autonomous delivery pilot, DSO has demonstrated that sidewalk robots can operate reliably in a hot-climate, mixed-use urban district, but this operational success has outpaced the governance frameworks, spatial design standards, and long-range planning foundations needed to scale deployment safely, inclusively, and sustainably to 2035. This thesis addresses that gap by asking how DSO can design and govern the integration of robots into its public realm by 2035 in a way that is safe, inclusive, climate-resilient, and aligned with Dubai’s Robotics and Automation Program. Using an interpretivist, case-study-based foresight methodology, the research combines PESTEL environmental scanning, a Futures Wheel analysis of cascading consequences, Causal Layered Analysis, and Dator’s four archetypal futures to construct four internally coherent 2035 scenarios for DSO, Silicon Swarm, Breakdown, Managed Corridors, and Living Lab Reborn, grounded in an online stakeholder survey (n = 34) and a semi-structured expert interview with a DIEZ smart city specialist. A backcasting exercise translates the preferred scenario elements into a strategic roadmap, and the findings are synthesised into a governance and design framework comprising a tiered licensing system, spatial design standards, climate-resilience requirements, and a stakeholder participation mechanism, together with an eighteen-indicator signpost matrix for monitoring which future is emerging. The research finds that governance development, not technological capability, is DSO’s most pressing robotics priority, that climate resilience is a distinctive and underserved dimension of the challenge, and that social legitimacy and inclusive design are preconditions for, rather than optional additions to, sustained robot integration. The thesis contributes a place-based, replicable foresight framework for hot-climate urban robotics governance, of direct relevance to DSO’s planners and to other Gulf and MENA cities facing similar transitions.

Publication Date

2026

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Professional Studies (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Graduate Programs & Research

Advisor

Ozcan OS Saritas

Campus

RIT Dubai

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