Timeline

Members of the Somabotics Fellowship attended the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge in Canterbury to install two prototypes — The Tickling Rocks and The Hug Chair — for Makers of Imaginary Worlds’ immersive installation “The Garden.”

Alongside setup, our researchers ran pre-tests with visitors, gathering data that will help shape ongoing work on how babies and young children perceive and interact with robots and embodied AI.

The Garden runs from from 25 April–5 July as part of the 2026 Playground Festival.

Richard Ramchurn recently ran a workshop at the Virtual and Immersive Production (VIP) Studio, University of Nottingham, to test a new development within AI LENS called AUTOPROMPT – a system designed to generate prompts dynamically from a live scene.

Somabotics hosted the Second International Conference in AI Music Studies (AIMS 2026) at the University of Nottingham’s School of Music on the 30^th March – 1^st of April. The conference brought together leading researchers to examine the opportunities, challenges, and emerging methodologies shaping the study of AI‑generated and AI‑supported music within the Humanities and Social Sciences, with a particular focus on inside knowledge.

Scholars from a wide range of fields—including musicology, ethnomusicology, human–AI interaction, sound studies, computer music, technology studies, philosophy, ethics, economics, and feminist and post-humanist studies—joined the conversation. Together, they explored what an academic discipline of AI Music Studies could and should look like, challenging existing boundaries and proposing new directions for the field.

Across the three days, the conference featured a rich programme of academic papers, panel discussions, workshops, a keynote address and a special concert at Peggy’s Skylight – delivered by visiting students from the University of Limerick – incorporating LOERIC, a cutting‑edge interactive AI music performance system.

Different Bodies: Staging Bodies Dancing with Robots The Different Bodies team met earlier this month to continue dancing with robots in the Cobot Maker Space at the University of Nottingham. Researchers from the Somabotics Fellowship – Rachael Garrett, Steve Benford, and Stacy Hseuh – met with Kate Marsh from Coventry University and choreographic partner Welly O’Brien for two and half days of research explorations.  Read more.

What does Meaningful Interaction look like?

An evening with Rosie and Jamie Rutherford performing music with, and sharing tales of Loeric at the Recital Hall, School of Music, University of Nottingham

The paper was presented by Professor Paul Tennent (Associate Professor, Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham) at the HRI conference “Robots for a Sustainable World”, in Melbourne, Australia, March 2025.

This first workshop explored ultilisation of captured video data to generate personalised designs.