Hands-On Robotics, Literally

On the 7th of October, a unique event took place in Delft at the RoboHouse. In collaboration with the Dramaturgy for Devices consortium, I gave a masterclass about “Physical Interaction with Machines”. Using 7 different robots, all set-up to be safe enough to touch whilst in operation, 30 participants from a wide variety of backgrounds experimented with what it’s like to be in close contact with robots.

To me it’s obvious that circus is the perfect lens from which to study physical interaction. Circus is all about exploring intense physical relationships. A trapeze artist hangs from a bar, and has their life depend on that bar functioning as promised. A floor acrobat pushes themselves away from the floor, balances on it, rolls over it. And a partner acrobat puts their weight in the hands of their colleague, letting themselves be pushed, pulled, carried, etc. Within these relationships between the performer and their surrounding objects and partners, artists search for the unusual, the impossible, and the amazing, in order to create novel tricks.

Robots, from robot vacuums to perhaps even humanoids, will be coming closer and closer to humans in the next decade. How should they respond if they bump into you? Will you dare to push them away? Give commands by holding their ‘hands’, punish them with a slap? Would you want to hug them? My methodology for understanding possible futures is to set up a playground for free exploration, just like I would do when exploring a new circus apparatus. So rather than discussing these theoretical interactions, we put the robots out in space and started exploring.

After a quick physical warm-up, I introduced the participants to their 7 new friends:

Pepper is a humanoid torso on a wheel base. It could be used as a dance partner, and with some effort it understood simple voice commands like ‘raise your left arm’.

Dalco Drive cars are indoor delivery cars. Participants could drive them around, bump into them, lean or pull on them whilst they were making patterns on the floor.

The Acrobot is my humanoid acrobat that I perform with all around the world. In the workshop it could walk around with the support of participants, or it could be posed like a mannequin.

My juggling cobot with a human hand (Fairino) was oscillating sideways in various positions, allowing it to be a partner you could hug and sway with.

A leader + follower pair of SO-100 allowed one human operator to puppeteer a copy of the same arm, which could interact with the participants by pinching their hand or pushing against their arms.

The LeKiwi is a small roaming platform equipped with the same SO-100 arm, but this time the operator could try to connect to the person playing with it through the cameras that were mounted on the platform. 

A Kuka cobot (LBR iiwa) was set-up in a compliant ‘springy’ mode, where it would push itself back to the position it came from. Sadly, as happens with robot experiments, it stopped being functional after only a few minutes of operation in the workshop…

In the workshop, participants played for roughly 2 hours with the various machines, using their bodies to explore the new relationships that formed. We had a mix of professional academics, choreographers, engineers, artists, and a bunch of master students, so of course I also wanted to understand their insights and expertise. The interaction was therefore followed by an hour of discussions and presentations.

So what did we learn? That’s hard to put into words, which, for a workshop about physical interaction, I’ll count as a success. You should have been there. Perhaps, the academics at Dramaturgy for Devices are better at words than I am, and they will soon publish their own article about the event. I will of course link it here.

Thanks to Joyce den Hertog, Roksolana Hoogstede-Malhanova from RoboHouse, and Maaike Bleeker from Dramaturgy for Devices for organizing this day together, it was a huge success!