Recently, the online Performing Robots Catalogue was published. This catalogue is a living archive of projects, artworks, performances and experiments which combine theatre and robotics. It is part of the larger research project Dramaturgy for Devices.In order to organize the different projects within the catalogue, we have created a taxonomy with relevant categories and sub-categories.

VU Lecture by Laura Karreman and Ulrike Quade On December 1st, 2025, Dr. Laura Karreman—Associate Professor in Media and Performance Studies at Utrecht University (UU)—and Ulrike Quade—theater director, artistic researcher, puppeteer, and scenographer—gave a lecture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) titled The Dramaturgy of Robots on Stage. The lecture was presented in the context…

We invite submissions to the special session Skillful Practices in Social Robotics and HRI – Approaches from the Performing Arts at the International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2026), held 1–4 July 2026 in London, UK. CALL FOR PROPOSALS The past decades have witnessed increased recognition of the relevance of skills and expertise from the

At the International Conference on Social Robotics and Art (ISCR), 1-4 July 2026 in London, we will be organizing the half-day workshop The Mechanics of Ensoulment: How Control Mappings Animate Social Robots. This workshop explores how different control interfaces and mapping strategies shape the expressive and social qualities of robots. Focusing on live and manually…

by Soyun Jang In November 2025, I visited the Centre for Transformative Media Technology at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, for a 15-day research exchange. Recently having moved to a new location, the centre had acquired a large studio space for a motion capture system, social robotics, and a volumetric capture system. While

At the beginning of December, PhD Candidate Enne Lampe, within the Dramaturgy for Devices project responsible for research on designing service robots for the hospitality sector, attended IASDR 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan. The theme of this years International Association of Societies of Design Research conference was ‘Design NEXT’. What is next for design as a discipline? Should it adapt

Science and theatre seem like two different worlds. Yet theatre can tell us something about what our future with robots will look like. ‘Theatre knowledge is relevant to robot development.’ Daan Appels wrote a series about feelings for robots for NEMO Kennislink, the journalistic platform of NEMO Science Museum. In his first article, he talks

On 26th and 27th September 2024, Amy Winter and her collaborators at TU/e’s Material Aesthetics Lab, Maaike Bleeker and Marco Rozendaal organised a workshop that delved into the potential of soft robotic technologies to animate expressive forms, creating novel interactions between humans and systems. Results of the workshop were presented at the Dutch Design Week

“If, as Shakespeare famously claimed, ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’, robots are the new kids on the block.” Prof. dr. Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University) The podcast ‘Acting Like A Robot’ is about the research of the same name within which the VU, UU, HKU and Ulrike Quade…

On 4 March 2025, Maaike Bleeker presented the paper ‘The Human-Robot Ensemble: Designing Expressive Movements for Restaurant Service Robots’, written by Hyumin Lee, Nazli Cila, Klaas Koerten, Maaike Bleeker and Marco Rozendaal, at the HRI’25 in Melbourne. HRI’25 is the 20th edition of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. At HRI, researchers and practitioners