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Toronto Dance Article:
A Dancing Robot
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Japanese scientists have developed a dancing robot that can follow a
human dancer's lead. Professor Kazuhiro Kosuge, leader of the Tohoku
University team that developed the robot, says future versions will
be able to move in sync with humans. The Ms. DanceR (Mobile Smart Dance
Robot) predicts the dancer's next move through hand pressure applied
to its arms and back. Equipped with a computer, sensors and batteries,
it can move in any direction on four wheels and has memory for steps
necessary to dance the waltz. Tomohiro Hayashi, a student of Tohoku
University, demonstrated the robot by leading it through a waltz for
photographers.
Why did the team pick the Waltz and not the Tango? "The robot cannot move
so fast, and tango is not easy for the robot at this moment," states Kosuge.
Tomohiro Hayashi, a student of Tohoku University, demonstrated the
robot by leading it through a waltz for photographers.
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The robot is being developed to understand human-human
interaction/communication mechanism and to synthesize it as human-robot
interaction. The mechanism designed for human-robot interaction could be
utilized when designing man-machine systems.
In social dancing, how to select an appropriate dance step is an important
and a difficult problem for a robot. Generally a female dancer estimates
the next step based on both the interface force between the dancers and
the knowledge of the social dancing. The dance partner robot consists of
an omni-directional mobile base, a six-axis force/torque sensor to measure
the force/torque applied to the robot and a PC based on control system to
apply the knowledge of the social dancing. A control architecture has been
proposed and several experiments illustrate the validity of the architecture.
Technical details will be presented at IROS200 (International Conference
on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in Las Vegas in October.
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How would you like to try out dancing with this robot in your classes?
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