To Attune to a Robot Arm: A Moving Body’s Perspective of Speculating, Programming, and Dancing with the Robot

Abstract

This thesis investigates human-robot interaction through the concept of attunement, focusing particularly on movement and dance. I use my personal experience of speculating, programming the movement of, and dancing with an industrial robot arm, a KR 10 R1100 sixx developed by KUKA, to guide my examination of how attunement unfolds in human-robot interaction. Following Yolgormez and Thibodeau, I advocate for the possibility of attuning ourselves to robots that are sometimes radically different from us in form and behavior. This poses a stark difference compared to studies in social robotics that aim to develop robots that attune to human behaviors and desires via means of technical advancement. With the help of Martin Heidegger and Katalin Vermes, attunement is conceptualized as an embodied perceptual tendency to affect and be affected by others that becomes salient in interactions. This interdisciplinary research employs various concepts and theories from social robotics and other relevant fields. By engaging in dialogue with this reinstated concept of attunement, the notions of mutual intelligence, kinesthetic empathy, thing-power, vitality affects, binocular vision, and more, I make supporting claims to the following arguments.

Movement is central to understanding attunement, as it has a special place in our perception by transforming an object into bodies we could feel for and with. We make sense of the movement of other bodies as behaviors based on the context in which the interaction emerges and our own situatedness as moving, feeling bodies. We can attune to and be affected by the movement of more-than-human bodies of radically different forms. Attuning to the robot in the form of care and respect for the robot’s materiality can be helpful for finding the movement of a robot that looks natural both to its own physique and our perception. Finally, I suggest that dance, especially in improvisational form, can be useful for underscoring attunement as an affective and embodied experience. In dance, the robot emerges as a dancer in our perception, rather than a mere machine. Dance can thus serve as an affective medium for reimagining our interactions with robots in ways that centralize attunement, emphasizing the affective and embodied aspect of human-robot interaction.