THE RESULTS OF THE EUROPEAN PROJECT “CONBOTS” IN THE MAGAZINE “SCIENCE ROBOTICS”
(CONNECTED THROUGH ROBOTS)
Robotics is growing in physical interaction with humans: two exoskeletons connected two violinists, replicating direct physical contact between the two individuals. Haptic feedback improved the musicians' motor coordination compared to using visual and auditory information alone. The study was coordinated by Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma with Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa, IUVO, CNR, University of Newcastle (UK) and University of Ghent (Belgium)
Rome, 12 March 2026 What if two musicians playing together could do more than just see and hear each other? What if they could also physically sense each other's movements? When two people perform a collaborative task, such as a violin duet, they rely primarily on sight and hearing for coordination, and cannot rely on physical contact. Yet, physical contact is crucial in social interactions between individuals: just think of a violin teacher who, when teaching a gesture to a student, doesn't simply demonstrate it by performing it, but grabs the student's arm and guides them through the correct movement. Through physical contact, the body can receive and transmit information related to movement, and it can do so even more effectively than previously thought, as a new international study demonstrates. published in the prestigious magazine Science Robotics and to whom the March 2026 cover.
I study, coordinated byUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, sheds light on this aspect by demonstrating that haptic feedback – the sense of touch and physical forces – can improve coordination in precise motor gestures, such as playing the violin in a duet, even more effectively than sight and hearing, which musicians traditionally rely on in the execution of the motor gesture. The study, which also involved the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, its spin-off company IUVO srl, the CNR (National Research Council), and Newcastle University (UK). and the University of Ghent (Belgium), is the result of the European project CONBOTS ("CONnected attraverso roBOTS"), coordinated by Professor Domenico Formica and funded by the European Union with almost 5 million euros under the Horizon 2020 program.
To replicate physical contact between the two violinists in a scenario where this is typically absent, researchers from the CONBOTS team developed a pair of wearable exoskeletons For the upper limbs, they can sense the movements of the two violinists and, when they don't coincide, apply forces proportional to the difference between their movements. In this way, the exoskeletons allow the two musicians to virtually connect, allowing them to physically sense their partner's movements, simulating direct physical contact.
The team tested the system with twenty pairs of violinists, ten amateur pairs and ten professional pairs, who performed a piece of music under four sensory conditions: hearing only; hearing and vision; hearing and haptics; and hearing, vision, and haptics. The musicians were unfamiliar with the exoskeletons and were not told they were physically connected. Nevertheless, in the presence of haptic feedback, coordination improved significantly, with the musicians aligning their arm movements more precisely, better synchronizing their bow positions, and achieving better musical coordination.
Surprisingly, the force feedback provided by the exoskeletons improved coordination more than visual feedback, although violinists are normally trained to rely on vision during duet performances. The most significant improvements occurred when all three senses were combined, highlighting the role of multisensory integration in fine sensorimotor tasks.
The results of the CONBOTS project They suggest that haptic feedback may represent an effective communication channel in collaborative tasks between individuals due to its implicit nature. Unlike visual cues, which require conscious attention, haptic feedback is bodily and immediate, allowing partners to adapt to each other's movements in an almost reflexive manner. Beyond music, this approach could have a broader impact on numerous collaborative activities, including motor learning, for example.
"We are entering an era where robots can mediate physical communication between humans in entirely new ways," adds Professor Domenico Formica of the Research Unit of Neurophysiology and Neuroengineering of Human-Technology Interaction (NeXTlab) ofUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma and study coordinator. "This study is a first step toward systems that physically connect people, enhancing their coordination, learning, and rehabilitation."
"Haptics, or tactile and kinesthetic perception, provides information in a fundamentally different way than sight," explains Francesco Di Tommaso, postdoctoral researcher at the Advanced Robotics and Human-Centered Technologies Research Unit (CREO Lab) of theUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma and corresponding author of the study - It's physical, direct, and immediate. Our results suggest that the human motor system can integrate this information very efficiently, even in highly skilled artists."
"These wearable robots - says Professor Nicola Vitiello, Rector and head of the research group at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna who designed the exoskeletons for this experiment - could support collaborative training, motor learning and even rehabilitation, where therapists and patients could be physically connected".
“This is a breakthrough in our understanding of the corporeal nature of human interaction with music,” concludes the Professor Emeritus Marc Leman, Former director of the IPEM-Musicology and the Art and Science Interaction Laboratory (ASIL) at Ghent University, where the tests were conducted. "Perceiving each other's movements during musical performance enhances the synchronization of shared temporal tasks more powerfully than expected, opening the way to applications beyond music, in domains that may involve coordinating actions over a distance."
