About us

Robots are a form of Artificial Intelligence that can sense, move through and act on the everyday world, including on our own human bodies. Enabling robots to collaborate with humans might bring many benefits from new artistic experiences that provoke meaning making to advances in care, mobility, and more besides. However, it also requires tackling deep research challenges that arise when people engage in physical and intimate contact with intelligent machines, from ensuring safety to understanding emotional experience. Whilst there is much research in the field of human-robot interaction into the design of robot bodies and minds, there is a lack of understanding the corresponding human experience.

Somabotics: Creatively Embodying AI, is a UKRI Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowship, which will pursue a distinctive approach to this challenge by:

1. Drawing on the creativity of artists by building on our long track record of artist-led research that delivers creative applications of emerging technologies, surfaces new design concepts and methods, engages the public with societal challenges, and delivers impact to the creative industries.
2. Building on a new design method called soma design; an approach that provides techniques and toolkits for placing the human body at the centre of technology design and has already proved beneficial to application in health and wellbeing. Combining soma design with artist-led creativity, we aim to tackle three core challenges

1. How can we extend robot and human mindsbodies to better engage the complexity and diversity of human embodied experience?
2. How can this benefit people by enabling them to improve their aesthetic bodily practices and what societal concerns need to be addressed?
3. How can this benefit the AI community’s capacity to undertake move creative research into embodiment?

Our team will engage humans and robots in an iterative artist-led design process to identify novel concepts and enabling technologies, partnering with internationally renowned artists to create and tour artworks.

We will work with the wider AI community to organise visits and exchanges, presence at key AI venues, host a symposium, run a summer school and release a data driven soma bits toolkit.

We plan to work with industry, media and the public to support touring artworks, a media campaign and a show for science festivals.

Our overall aim will be to raise the profile of embodiment as a critical concern for AI and to transform how the AI community approaches it – placing human bodily experience at the focus and bringing a greater creativity, disruption and public engagement to AI research.