Artistic applications of robotics, although having been largely overlooked, have mainly focused so far on non-collaborative tasks involving expressiveness/creativeness of robot behavior with limited interactivity. Examples include robot painting , robot theater , or robot dance . In this project, we explored the idea of a human-robot collaborative artistic task, in which a dancer and a robot interact with each other to create an improvisational dance piece. The two dimensions we focused on were safety and motion expressiveness. We enabled dancers to physically interact with a robot in an improvisational dance piece involving two modalities: motion and physical contact. The second component was inspired by a dance form called contact improvisation .

Playlist, including progress and extra features that were not part of the main demo

Full Report of our process, motivation, and technical solution