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
exercises to explore the opportunities and challenges of dancing
with manufacturing robot arms. We reveal how they employed
their bodily senses and honed physical skills to engage 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
grasping, might recognise tacit embodied safety cues, and that
safety should be learned through iterative bodily experience
interleaved with reflection.