The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

This paper describes a robotic system that uses dance as a form of social interaction to explore the properties and importance of rhythmic movement in general social interaction. The system consists of a small creature-like robot whose movement is controlled by a rhythm-based software system. Environmental rhythms can be extracted from auditory or visual sensory stimuli, and the robot synchronizes its movement to a dominant rhythm. The system was demonstrated, and an exploratory study conducted, with children interacting with the robot in a generalized dance task. Through a behavioral analysis of videotaped interactions, we found that the robot? synchronization with the background music had an effect on children? interactive involvement with the robot. Furthermore, we observed a number of expected and unexpected styles and modalities of interactive exploration and play that inform our discussion on the next steps in the design of a socially rhythmic robotic system.

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Vision and Autonomous Systems Center and Quality of Life Technology Center

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Human-Robot Interaction Group

Associated Project(s): BeatBots

Number of pages: 8

Text Reference

Marek Piotr Michalowski, S. Sabanovic, and H. Kozima., "A dancing robot for rhythmic social interaction," Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2007), March, 2007, pp. 89 - 96.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Michalowski_2007_5767,
   author = "Marek Piotr Michalowski and S. Sabanovic and H. Kozima.",
   title = "A dancing robot for rhythmic social interaction",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2007)",
   pages = "89 - 96",
   publisher = "ACM",
   month = "March",
   year = "2007",
}

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