The Digital Futures Drone Arena is a concrete as well as a conceptual platform. It is a place where key players in digital transformation and society join in a conversation about the role and impact of mobile robotics, autonomous systems, machine learning, and human-computer interaction. The platform takes the form of a novel aerial drone testbed, where drone competitions take place periodically to understand and explore the unfolding relationships between humans and drones.

Aerial drones are used as an opportunity to create a foundation that lives past the end of this project, useful as a long-standing basis for testing technical advances and to study, design, and envision novel relationships between humans and robots.

Few robot testbeds exist to experiment with application-level functionality. The Digital Futures Drone Arena bridges this gap by providing an easy-to-use programmable drone testbed for experimenting with novel drone applications and explore the relations between humans and drones.

The latter activity is driven by the concept of a “soma” – the lived and felt body as it exists, moves, and senses in the world. The theory provides an ethical stance on the soma as it draws attention to how technologies and interactions encourage certain movements and practices while discouraging others. When we interact closely with drones, we have to adapt ourselves to how we control them and move around them.