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

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 exer-cises 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.