From Cage to Stage: Mapping Aesthetic Dance Movements Onto an Industrial Robot

In the ever-evolving era of technological advancement, the intersection of art and robotics has arisen as a captivating frontier, where the precision of mechanisms is blended with the emotive impact of human expression. Although dance and robotics seem to be two different disciplines, they share a common study field: movement. The purpose of dance, and generally for theatrical discipline, movement research is to investigate how to create a poetic language through human body movements and choreographed gestures that captivate audiences. On the other hand, conventional research about robotics focuses on the programming or learning of kinematic chains to efficiently achieve pragmatic tasks. In the context of this study, we aim to bridge the gap between these seemingly different application fields by introducing a novel approach to generate aesthetic choreographies for a robotic arm and study the perception shift from pragmatic and industrial-like to artistic and aesthetic in the audience opinion. The proposed method consists of the decomposition of robot and dancer movements into their Principal Components (PC) to fill the gap between the amount of degree of freedom (DoF) of the human kinematic structure and the robot one, minimizing the nuance loss due to the dimensionality reduction. Subsequently, the PCs of inherent movements of these two different kinematic structures are merged and blended. This approach allows for the harmonious fusion of the precision-driven motions of the robotic arm with the organic, emotive gestures intrinsic to dance. This synergistic blending of elements not only enhances the aesthetic appeal of the robotic arm's but also introduces a captivating narrative dimension to its industrial functionality.