Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Rachael Garrett is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction, soma design, and embodied interaction. Her work fundamentally reimagines how humans relate to robots, moving beyond functional utility toward rich, sensory, and even playful encounters. Garrett’s major contributions include introducing the *umwelt*—an animal’s perceptual world—as a design metaphor for human-drone interaction, detailed in her highly cited paper “How to Train Your Drone” (9 citations). She also explores transdisciplinary art-robotics collaborations, as seen in “How Artists Improvise and Provoke Robotics” (7 citations), and reframes robot collisions as meaningful experiences in “Tangles” (3 citations). A key achievement is her development of “Somatic Safety” (3 citations), an embodied approach that redefines safe human-robot interaction through contact improvisation with dancers. With a growing citation impact across her portfolio, Garrett is shaping a new paradigm where robots are not tools to be controlled, but partners to be felt, improvised with, and even collided with—pushing the boundaries of interaction design toward deeper, more human-centered futures.