We are delighted to welcome the project team and partners in this project to our facility.

The project is exploring the idea of deeply embodied trust in autonomous systems through a process of bringing expert moving bodies into harmony with robots. Working with professional dancers who have different disabilities and who may dance with assistive technologies and/or prosthetics, the team will employ body-based methods, including contact improvisation and soma design (a process that allows designers to examine and improve on connections between sensation, feeling, emotion, subjective understanding and values), to examine the machine/body interface and reimagine bodily contact with robots as being creative, expressive and trustworthy rather than being harmful and a problem to be avoided.

Bringing perspectives from dance into the design of human-robot interaction has the potential to transform robots into more creative and aesthetic technologies, enabling new approaches with technology partners from other domains in the future, where collaboration with robots incorporates new modes of synchronising movement to address safety and ergonomics.

This project is funded by the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub