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Professor STEVE BENFORD's Outputs (3)

How Artists Improvise and Provoke Robotics (2025)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Benford, S., Garrett, R., Schneiders, E., Tennent, P., Chamberlain, A., Avila, J., Brundell, P., & Castle-Green, S. (2024, October). How Artists Improvise and Provoke Robotics. Poster presented at 16th International Conference on Social Robotics + AI (ICSR + AI) 2024, Odense, Denmark

We explore transdisciplinary collaborations between artists and roboticists across a portfolio of artworks. Brendan Walker's Bronco-matic was a breath controlled mechanical rodeo bull ride. Blast Theory's Cat Royale deployed a robot arm to play with... Read More about How Artists Improvise and Provoke Robotics.

Tangles: Unpacking Extended Collision Experiences with Soma Trajectories (2025)
Journal Article
Benford, S., Garrett, R., Li, C., Tennent, P., NÚÑEZ-PACHECO, C., Núñez-Pacheco, C., Kucukyilmaz, A., Tsaknaki, V., HÖÖK, K., Höök, K., Caleb-Solly, P., Marshall, J., Schneiders, E., Popova, K., & Afana, J. (in press). Tangles: Unpacking Extended Collision Experiences with Soma Trajectories. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, https://doi.org/10.1145/3723875

We reappraise the idea of colliding with robots, moving from a position that tries to avoid or mitigate collisions to one that considers them an important facet of human interaction. We report on a soma design workshop that explored how our bodies co... Read More about Tangles: Unpacking Extended Collision Experiences with Soma Trajectories.

Somatic Safety: An Embodied Approach Towards Safe Human-Robot Interaction (2025)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Benford, S., Schneiders, E., Martinez Avila, J. P., Caleb-Solley, P., Brundell, P. R., Castle-Green, S., Zhou, F., Garrett, R., Höök, K., Whatley, S., Marsh, K., & Tennent, P. (2025, March). Somatic Safety: An Embodied Approach Towards Safe Human-Robot Interaction. Presented at HRI '25: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Melbourne, Australia

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... Read More about Somatic Safety: An Embodied Approach Towards Safe Human-Robot Interaction.