“As robots enter the messy human world so the vital matter of safety takes on a fresh complexion with physical contact becoming inevitable and even desirable. Somatic Safety An Embodied Approach Towards Safe Human Robot Interaction reports on an artistic-exploration of how dancers, working  as part of a multidisciplinary team, engaged in contact improvisation exercises to explore the opportunities and challenges of dancing with cobots.  It reveals how they employed their honed bodily senses and physical skills to engage with the robots aesthetically and yet safely, interleaving improvised physical manipulations with reflections to grow their knowledge of how the robots behaved and felt”.

The paper was presented by Professor Paul Tennent (Associate Professor, Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham) at the HRI conference “Robots for a Sustainable World”, in Melbourne, Australia, March 2025.