The ability of a robot to operate in an uncertain environment, such as near humans or far away under human control, potentially opens myriad uses. Examples include robots preparing the Mars surface for human arrival; robots for assembly of large space telescopes; robot helpers for the elderly; robotic search and disposal of war mines. So far advances in this area have been coming slowly, with a focus on specific tasks rather than a universal ability typical in nature. Challenges appear both on the robotics side and on the human side: robots have a hard time adjusting to an unstructured environment, whereas human cognition has serious limits in adjusting to robots and grasping complex 2D and 3D motion tasks. As a result, applications where robots operate near humans – or far away under their control – are exceedingly rare. The way out of this impasse is to supply the robot with whole-body sensing – an ability to sense surrounding objects at the robot’s whole body – and algorithms capable of utilizing these data in real-time. This calls for large-area flexible sensing arrays – sensitive skin covering the whole robot body akin to the skin covering the human body. Whole-body sensing brings interesting, even unexpected, properties: powerful robots become inherently safe; human operators can move them fast, with “natural” speeds; robot motion strategies exceed human spatial reasoning skills; it becomes realistic to utilize the natural synergy of human-robot teams and allow a mix of supervised and unsupervised robot operation. We will review the cognitive science, mathematical, algorithmic, and hardware (materials, electronics, computing) issues involved in realizing such systems. Speaker(s): Vladimir, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/318482