Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems

As robotic systems are moved out of factory work cells into human-facing environments questions of choreography become central to their design, placement, and application. With a human viewer or counterpart present, a system will automatically be interpreted within context, style of movement, and form factor by human beings as animate elements of their environment. The interpretation by this human counterpart is critical to the success of the system's integration: knobs on the system need to make sense to a human counterpart; an artificial agent should have a way of notifying a human counterpart of a change in system state, possibly through motion profiles; and the motion of a human counterpart may have important contextual clues for task completion. Thus, professional choreographers, dance practitioners, and movement analysts are critical to research in robotics. They have design methods for movement that align with human audience perception, can identify simplified features of movement for human-robot interaction goals, and have detailed knowledge of the capacity of human movement. This article provides approaches employed by one research lab, specific impacts on technical and artistic projects within, and principles that may guide future such work. The background section reports on choreography, somatic perspectives, improvisation, the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, and robotics. From this context methods including embodied exercises, writing prompts, and community building activities have been developed to facilitate interdisciplinary research. The results of this work is presented as an overview of a smattering of projects in areas like high-level motion planning, software development for rapid prototyping of movement, artistic output, and user studies that help understand how people interpret movement. Finally, guiding principles for other groups to adopt are posited.Comment: Under review at MDPI Arts Special Issue "The Machine as Artist (for the 21st Century)" http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/Machine_Artis

Take the Lead: Toward a Virtual Video Dance Partner

My work focuses on taking a single person as input and predicting the intentional movement of one dance partner based on the other dance partner\u27s movement. Human pose estimation has been applied to dance and computer vision, but many existing applications focus on a single individual or multiple individuals performing. Currently there are very few works that focus specifically on dance couples combined with pose prediction. This thesis is applicable to the entertainment and gaming industry by training people to dance with a virtual dance partner. Many existing interactive or virtual dance partners require a motion capture system, multiple cameras or a robot which creates an expensive cost. This thesis does not use a motion capture system and combines OpenPose with swing dance YouTube videos to create a virtual dance partner. By taking in the current dancer\u27s moves as input, the system predicts the dance partner\u27s corresponding moves in the video frames. In order to create a virtual dance partner, datasets that contain information about the skeleton keypoints are necessary to predict a dance partner\u27s pose. There are existing dance datasets for a specific type of dance, but these datasets do not cover swing dance. Furthermore, the dance datasets that do include swing have a limited number of videos. The contribution of this thesis is a large swing dataset that contains three different types of swing dance: East Coast, Lindy Hop and West Coast. I also provide a basic framework to extend the work to create a real-time and interactive dance partner

Example-based control of human motion

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-43).In human motion control applications, the mapping between a control specification and an appropriate target motion often defies an explicit encoding. This thesis presents a method that allows such a mapping to be defined by example, given that the control specification is recorded motion. The method begins by building a database of semantically meaningful instances of the mapping, each of which is represented by synchronized segments of control and target motion. A dynamic programming algorithm can then be used to interpret an input control specification in terms of mapping instances. This interpretation induces a sequence of target segments from the database, which is concatenated to create the appropriate target motion. The method is evaluated on two examples of indirect control. In the first, it is used to synthesize a walking human character that follows a sampled trajectory. In the second, it is used generate a synthetic partner for a dancer whose motion is acquired through motion capture.by Eugene Hsu.S.M

Automatic Sign Dance Synthesis from Gesture-based Sign Language

Automatic dance synthesis has become more and more popular due to the increasing demand in computer games and animations. Existing research generates dance motions without much consideration for the context of the music. In reality, professional dancers make choreography according to the lyrics and music features. In this research, we focus on a particular genre of dance known as sign dance, which combines gesture-based sign language with full body dance motion. We propose a system to automatically generate sign dance from a piece of music and its corresponding sign gesture. The core of the system is a Sign Dance Model trained by multiple regression analysis to represent the correlations between sign dance and sign gesture/music, as well as a set of objective functions to evaluate the quality of the sign dance. Our system can be applied to music visualization, allowing people with hearing difficulties to understand and enjoy music

Conceptualising interaction in live performance: Reflections on 'Encoded'

This paper presents a detailed examination of experiences of the creative team responsible for the direction, choreography, interaction design and performance of a dance and physical theatre work, Encoded. Interviews, observations and reflection on personal experience have made visible a range of different perspectives on the design, use and creative exploration of the interactive systems that were created for the work. The work itself, and in particular the use of interactive systems, was overall considered to be successful and coherent, even while participants' approaches and concerns were often markedly different. A trajectory of creative development in which exploratory improvisation and iterative design gradually became 'locked down' in preparation for final performance and touring is described