Robot dancing: What makes a dance?

In this paper, we investigate the mechanics of dance for humans that can be applied to robots, in an attempt to make dancing robots learn the fundamentals of dance, and improve their dancing. We provide a conceptual definition of ‘dance’ and ‘movement’ to make robot dancers form their own movements to music. We used a virtual robot dog to experiment on our conceptual definitions, and human subjects to give their feedback on the robot’s dancing. Experimental results show that the robot learns (using reinforcement learning) our conceptual definition of ‘dance’ and that a dance that has structure and fundamental joint movements, improves the dancing.