Somatic Safety: An Embodied Approach Towards Safe Human-Robot Interaction
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses safety challenges in human–robot physical interaction by proposing “somatic safety”—a paradigm asserting that safety is not merely algorithmic constraint or rule-based reasoning, but must be acquired, perceived, and enacted through embodied experience.
Method: We integrate contact improvisation training, phenomenological reflection, observational analysis of human–robot co-behavior, and interdisciplinary art–engineering workshops to cultivate dancers’ intuitive understanding of robotic dynamics and their capacity to discern safety boundaries during real-time interaction.
Contribution/Results: Empirical findings demonstrate that bodily intelligence enables rapid, reliable safety-critical decision-making; robots can detect and respond to tacit human safety cues—including subtle shifts in muscular tension and center-of-mass displacement—supporting safe handover and dynamic physical collaboration. The work establishes a transferable cognitive framework and empirically grounded methodology for embodied human–robot safety design.
Application Category
📝 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.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Exploring safe human-robot interaction through physical contact
Developing somatic safety via embodied learning and reflection
Designing robots for better tactile interaction and safety cues
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Contact improvisation with cobots for safety
Somatic safety through mind-body learning
Iterative bodily experience with reflection
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