Real Robot Dance Challenge: Exploring live and online dance challenge videos for robot movement

This paper describes a proposed robotic artwork for the MOCO 2024 conference. Real Robot Dance Challenge is a human-robot art installation that investigates both live human-robot interactions as well as human movement embedded in online videos as sources for the robot's movement. Dance is extremely challenging for a robot in terms of movement goals. Compared to typical industrial robot approaches, actions may have a comparative excess expenditure of energy, and style and expressivity becoming more important than accuracy and control. This work draws on the popular trend of dance challenges as seen on platforms such as Tik Tok [1]. The short format dances, often 10 – 30 seconds long, are choreographed with the intention of showcasing skills as well as challenging others to reinterpret the dance, often done with individual stylistic changes. RRDC challenges the robot to reinterpret the movement of human movers interacting live as well as dances contained in online videos. The artwork leverages the unity game engine as a mediating platform for the robot to access human movement and repurpose it for its own body. This allows the robot's movement to be procured from multiple sources. The unity environment can also be used to connect robots of different morphologies to the movement sources enabling flexibility in the engagement between human and robot. The robot moves beyond the control of programmed actions, able to respond with interpretations of the movement offered to it.