Juan Pablo Martinez Avila

We explore transdisciplinary collaborations between artists and roboticists across a portfolio of artworks. Brendan Walker’s Broncomatic was a breath controlled mechanical rodeo bull ride. Blast Theory’s Cat Royale deployed a robot arm to play with a family of three cats for twelve days. Different Bodies is a prototype improvised dance performance in which dancers with disabilities physically manipulate two mirrored robot arms. We reflect on these to explore how artists shape robotics research through the two key strategies of improvisation and provocation. Artists are skilled at improvising extended robot experiences that surface opportunities for technology-focused design, but which also require researchers to improvise their research processes. Artists may provoke audiences into reflecting on the societal implications of robots, but at the same time challenge the established techno-centric concepts, methods and underlying epistemology of robotics research.

Despite resurgent interest in remote work technologies, many forms of specialised work remain inaccessible. Participation in remote activities often requires more than video-conferencing. Telepresence technologies, using robotics and mixed reality, can fill that gap by providing more affordances (movement and embodied expressions). However, we still need to know what kinds of affordances are needed and how they should be implemented. This workshop focuses on telepresence technologies for mediating specialised tasks and extending expertise reach, such as teaching technical skills or providing healthcare assistance. We will invite experts from specific fields (e.g., education, healthcare, industry) to guide participants through use cases, and use interactive exercises to identify what kinds of actions and interaction modalities are important in different scenarios. The aim of the workshop is to explore this hands-on, needs-driven design approach, initiate critical discussions into the design of telepresence technologies and foster future work driven by a focus on understanding practical user needs.

Mobile robotic telepresence systems have been around for more than a decade, promising to improve on traditional video conferencing by enabling remote movement, and more recently, providing autonomous features for navigation, yet their use in the real world remains limited and infrequent. We share reflections from running a hybrid design workshop on telepresence robotics (at an academic conference) focused on re-imagining the design and use of telepresence robots, where mobility, as the main affordance of these devices, could truly provide value. We describe our hybrid design workshop and reflect on challenges encountered and learning outcomes.

We report a practice-based exploration of developing and performing with an autonomous AI musician called LOERIC that improvises folk tunes in response to a human partner. We follow an artist-led methodology involving a subjective, first-person reflection on our own practice of iteratively developing LOERIC through a series of public performances. A key feature of LOERIC is the manner in which autonomy is negotiated. Prior to a performance, surrender and looseness of control are preconfigured as playing styles. During a performance, the human and LOERIC interact solely through the single parameter of musical intensity to enable the human musician to loose awareness of explicit control as part of a flowful musical experience. This separation also helps the human establish a baseline of trust in how the system might potentially behave beforehand, within which they can safely experiment and improvise when playing live.

In recent years virtual meetings have become the predominant alternative to face-to-face meetings. Ongoing efforts in the design of telepresence robots promise remote access to physical settings and a greater sense of presence, leading to improved remote collaboration. However, a comparable sense of physical presence and utility has yet to be achieved. Mobile telepresence still provides limited ways to interact with remote users (e.g., with the environment and other people). This workshop aims to re-imagine telepresence robots, moving away from the decades-old ‘iPad-on-a-stick’ paradigm. Using interactive activities involving existing telepresence robots and a hybrid workshop format, we hope to ideate ways of expanding the capabilities of mobile telepresence robots through a range of mechanisms (e.g., mobile and wearable technology, Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, etc.) and to inform the future design of these devices to provide additional affordances. In doing so, we plan to identify use cases for which mobile telepresence robots can provide additional value through their locomotive capabilities compared to current screen-based remote interactions. Lastly, we aim to identify scenarios for future research in Mobile HCI using use cases and affordances identified during the workshop to support more equitable participation for remote users.