Autonomous Robot Dancing

Musical robots have already inspired the creation of worldwide robotic dancing contests, as RoboCup-Junior's Dance, where school teams, formed by children aged eight to eighteen, put their robots in action, performing dance to music in a display that emphasizes creativity of costumes and movement. This book describes and assesses a user-customizable framework for robot dancing edutainment applications. The proposed architecture enables the definition of choreographic compositions, which result on a conjunction of reactive dancing motions in real-time response to multi-modal inputs. These inputs are shaped in the form of three rhythmic events, different dance floor colors, and the awareness of the surrounding obstacles. This architecture was applied to a Lego-NXT humanoid robot dancing on a real-world dance stage. We report on an empirical evaluation over the overall robot dance performance made to a group of students after a set of live demonstrations. This evaluation validated the framework's potential application in edutainment and its ability to sustain the interest of the general audience by offering a reasonable compromise between musical-synchrony, variability and animacy.

Autorentext

João L. Oliveira received the MSc degree in Electrical and Computers Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) in 2008.Since 2008 he is a PhD student in Informatics Engineering at FEUP and a research member of LIACC and INESC Porto.His main research is in Autonomous Robot Dancing and Audio Beat Tracking.