---

Project Leader: Professor Sarah Whatley
Artistic Partner: Candoco Dance Company
Official Project Website: https://tas.ac.uk/

Research Funding: UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub

Status: Complete

---

Project Description

Robots are often designed for highly controlled or dangerous industrial or automotive contexts where physical contact with humans is generally considered undesirable. However, robots are moving closer to bodies as they enter our homes and social spaces. The messiness of our everyday life will make physical contact difficult to avoid.

To explore how physical contact between humans and robots might intentionally unfold, this project invited professional dancers with different disabilities to engage with industrial robots. Our goal was to embrace the experience of those who live closely with assistive devices to reimagine ethics in human-robot interaction as creative, trustworthy and desirable. Over the course of 18 months, we conducted a series of dance-led workshops and supported these artists in their creative explorations of the robots. The workshops were conducted onsite at the Cobot Maker Space at the University of Nottingham.

This research will continue as part of the Somabotics Fellowship.

---

Highlighted Publications

[Pre-Print] Garrett, Brundell, Castle-Green, Hawkins, Tennent, Zhou, Lampinen, Höök, and Benford. 2025. Friction in Processual Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethical Relations in Interdisciplinary Research. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714123

[Pre-Print] Garrett & Hawkins, Brundell, Castle-Green, Tennent, Zhou, Lampinen, Höök, and Benford. 2025. In the Moment of Glitch: Engaging with Misalignments in Ethical Practice. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713632