Abstract
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; they can help identify simplified features of movement that will effectively accomplish human-robot interaction goals; and they 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 are 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.
Highlights
Domin: ...Man is a being that does things such as feeling happiness, plays the violin, likes to go for a walk, and all sorts of other things which are not needed
The methods described above have been utilized in a myriad of robotic projects, in the RAD Lab and outside it
In successful funding proposals, these methods have been explicitly touted for their potential for dramatic leaps forward inside robotic control and human-robot interaction
Summary
Domin: ...Man is a being that does things such as feeling happiness, plays the violin, likes to go for a walk, and all sorts of other things which are not needed. To be able to address complex questions pertaining to generating, interpreting, and reproducing movement, relying too heavily on rhetorical or phenomenological aims can be limiting in a way that may be invisible or not salient for the agents This is one reason, among many, to support bringing engineers and choreographers together into one shared space, and, for a robotics lab, to employ phenomenologically motivated practice in our research. Our approach is pragmatic: we want to understand the phenomenon of how people create such vastly varied motion profiles that communicate complex intent This knowledge is contained inside body-based movement training and somatic practice where practitioners hone their own movement capabilities by expanding their array of choices. Somatic approaches, being distinguished from a broad category of body-based approaches, allow us to extract knowledge from experience of the body from an internal perspective, which is called “soma”, a distinct idea from the body itself (Eddy 2009)
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