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Somatic Safety: An Embodied Approach Towards Safe Human-Robot Interaction

Steve Benford, Eike Schneiders, Juan Pablo Martinez Avila, Praminda Caleb-Solly, Patrick Robert Brundell, Simon Castle-Green, Feng Zhou, Rachael Garrett, Kristina Höök, Sarah Whatley, Kate Marsh, Paul Tennent

TL;DR

The paper addresses safety in close, physical human-robot interaction by proposing somatic safety, an embodied approach where safety is learned through bodily experience and reflection. It conveys this through an artist-led program with professional dancers collaborating with cobots across five workshops, combining hands-on manipulation with iterative assessment to reveal how safety emerges from practice. The study contributes a concrete concept—somatic safety—along with design implications (e.g., graspable interfaces, soft boundaries) and demonstrates how embodied practice can reveal tacit safety cues and safe interaction patterns. The work broadens safety discourse in HRI to include ethics and learning processes, with potential impact for care, rehabilitation, and everyday robot-human collaboration beyond artistic contexts.

Abstract

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. We report 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. We reveal 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. We introduce somatic safety, a holistic mind-body approach in which safety is learned, felt and enacted through bodily contact with robots in addition to being reasoned about. We conclude that robots need to be better designed for people to hold them and might recognise tacit safety cues among people.We propose that safety should be learned through iterative bodily experience interleaved with reflection.

Somatic Safety: An Embodied Approach Towards Safe Human-Robot Interaction

TL;DR

The paper addresses safety in close, physical human-robot interaction by proposing somatic safety, an embodied approach where safety is learned through bodily experience and reflection. It conveys this through an artist-led program with professional dancers collaborating with cobots across five workshops, combining hands-on manipulation with iterative assessment to reveal how safety emerges from practice. The study contributes a concrete concept—somatic safety—along with design implications (e.g., graspable interfaces, soft boundaries) and demonstrates how embodied practice can reveal tacit safety cues and safe interaction patterns. The work broadens safety discourse in HRI to include ethics and learning processes, with potential impact for care, rehabilitation, and everyday robot-human collaboration beyond artistic contexts.

Abstract

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. We report 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. We reveal 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. We introduce somatic safety, a holistic mind-body approach in which safety is learned, felt and enacted through bodily contact with robots in addition to being reasoned about. We conclude that robots need to be better designed for people to hold them and might recognise tacit safety cues among people.We propose that safety should be learned through iterative bodily experience interleaved with reflection.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 16 sections, 3 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Robot and Cobot Safety
  4. Dancing with Robots
  5. Somatic Perspectives
  6. Methodology
  7. Learning to dance safely with robots
  8. Establishing safety protocols, environment & roles
  9. Discovering the robots’ limits
  10. Performing vulnerability
  11. A problem occurs
  12. Discussions & Reflections
  13. Learning safety through bodily experience
  14. Making robots touchable and graspable
  15. Visibly enacting safety through the body
  16. ...and 1 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure : [from workshop 3, 6th December 2023] The Manipulator explores the limits of the robots freezing behaviour through physical experimentation.
  • Figure : [from workshop 4, 6th February 2024] Once familiar with the robot, the dancers are able to take risks as part of an aesthetic of performing vulnerability.
  • Figure : [from workshop 4, 6th February 2024] Growing awareness in the room of strange robot behaviour leads to the 'Red Button' being pressed