I'm the co-founder and Creative Director of a company in Bristol making very charismatic work; giant joyful robots in the form of creatures and plants. We're a small team of people with non-traditional careers and routes into robotics. In the last two years, I have led Air Giants to becoming an internationally-recognised creative technology company with patent-pending innovations. We champion diversity of experience and background and this has enabled us to make extraordinary work. Our installations are accessible and our installations attract broad audiences; the work non-verbal and non-durational, and we see audiences of all ages enjoying it. This project will hugely increase the audiences we can serve by letting us show in settings which don't have the budget to show larger work. Giant Robots By Post will expand the reach of our work by developing ways to simplify delivery and deployment. Our current work requires a team to install and run; to support installations at small events, we need to reduce these complexities and costs. Our work is usually only seen at big venues and in institutional contexts, which means that means many people never get to experience it. We intend to develop technical and creative strategies to allow us to make work which can be easily shipped to a venue (perhaps an art festival, perhaps a single school or community centre) and which can be unpacked and run without technical training by the recipients. This will expand our exhibition opportunities to new audiences, and will open up a new sustainable revenue stream for us. Further, it means that cutting-edge creative technology comes to people wherever they are, directly tackling barriers to art and STEM. Delivering accessible work and great experiences is central to this project. My journey to becoming the director of a robotics company was highly non-traditional and I had to overcome significant barriers to get here. I have a passion for education and mentoring. I have run workshops for people accessing arts for the first time and with professionals undertaking CPD. I am a regular guest lecturer at 3 universities, and am part of the Arts Emergency network. I love being part of a rich community with many ways of thinking. I would encourage people into creative technology because they might be fantastic at it, but also because it is a hugely varied and rewarding field in which to work.

Air Giants are a creative robotics company making a new kind of giant (typically 5-10m) interactive soft robot using fabric, air, and computing. They are aimed at artistic and creative purposes. Throughout our multiple exhibitions (public art, festivals), we have seen a big appetite for large-scale close-up tactile interaction between humans and our huge soft robots, both upper-body interactions (strokes and hugs) but also whole-body interactions (leaning in, sitting on, being enclosed, being lifted and moved by the robot). This happens even though our robots do not detect touch or respond to it in meaningful ways. This is confirmed by our visitor surveys which often mention these interactions. These interactions with our giant robots need to go both ways, so the robot detects touch and responds to it in haptically-interesting ways (shape change, surface vibration, supporting and moving the person). These interactions engage the tactile, proprioceptive, and vestibular senses in ways which are rarely explored and show great promise for compelling interactions. There is no conventionally-deployed technology to do either the detection or response in a safe and economical way. To achieve this we are pairing up with the Bristol Interaction Group, an academic group specialized in the interactions between humans and technology. Our goals are to (1) build the technology to sense touch over large inflated surfaces, both economically and with adequate spatial resolution and timeliness; (2) build the actuations that can respond in emotionally-effective ways; and (3) understand how humans interact with giant tactile robots to create new interaction paradigms (4) understand how these interactions can dovetail into VR, AR, XR experiences to add meaning and storytelling opportunities. There's a lot of new territory to explore both creatively and academically. Although there has been a lot of work on haptic interaction with robots and digital systems, it is nearly all focused on small-scale interaction with the hands. Very little of it uses the whole body, or engages the rich interactions that develop when people start to entrust their weight to the robot or move around bodily with the robot. This project will open up the space for interacting with soft robots, impacting the fields of Soft Robotics and Human Computer Interaction. Giant tactile robots in public art, in VR (especially gaming), in the theme park industry; or alternatively to be used for digital health and wellbeing, e.g. to create innovative sensory environments for children with special needs.

Air Giants will create indoor-scale interactive biomorphic soft robots for use in entertainment and cultural settings. By innovating on their existing large-scale work, the company will develop a product which answers industry needs of affordability, safety, reliability and novelty. This compact version of their current technology opens the door for the adoption of cutting-edge interactive robotics widely across the entertainment industry.