MDRPC: Music-Driven Robot Primitives Choreography

Dance has been an important art form and means of communication since the dawn of human civilization. Equipping humanoid robots with the ability to perform smooth dance movements to music is a key research priority in artificial intelligence, robotics and human-computer interaction. However, existing kinematics-based dance generation methods often violate real-world physical laws as they do not consider physical constraints, leading to unrealistic movements. Additionally, due to the diversity and dynamic variability of input music, most existing physics-based methods, which rely on task-specific reward functions, face significant challenges in effectively handling music-driven dance generation tasks. To address these issues, we introduce MDRPC, the first physics-based, music-driven dance generation method for humanoid robots. Inspired by human choreographic principles, MDRPC is defined as a two-phase framework. The initial phase utilizes adversarial imitation learning to acquire a rich set of reusable dance primitives from a music-dance dataset. In the subsequent phase, these dance primitives are orchestrated under the guidance of musical theory and choreographic rules to generate complex humanoid dance sequences. Specifically, we propose beat alignment and dance diversity reward functions to synchronize motion rhythms with music beats and enhance the diversity of dance movements. We implement MDRPC on a simulated humanoid robot, and the results confirm that our method effectively controls the humanoid, enabling it to perform dance movements harmoniously synchronized with the music.