Robots and Dance: A Promising Young Alchemy

Research at the intersection of robots and dance promises to create vehicles for expression that enable new creative pursuits and allow robots to function better, especially in human-facing scenarios. Moving this research beyond fringe spectacle and establishing it as a serious, systematic field—a proper subdiscipline of both robotics and dance—will require answering a key question: How does dance advance the fundamentals of robotics, and vice versa? Focusing on the former, this article offers glimpses of this new field with examples of meaningful contributions to control, robotics, and autonomous systems, such as novel actuator designs, improved sensing systems, salient motion profiles for robots, reproducible experiment designs, and new theories of motion derived from the study of dance. It also poses two grand challenges for the emerging field of choreobotics: developing a robust symbolic system for representing bodily action and establishing rich, repeatable testing environments for human–robot interaction.