Dances with Robots

Posted 5 Feb 2004 at 21:53 UTC by steve

MIT student Sommer Gentry and her husband Dorry Segev have developed a highly evolved system of robot communication and control via haptic signaling. The system is better known as "Swing Dancing". They started with two human swing dancers. From there they progressed to "Jedi Swing Dancing" in which two blindfolding humans dance (thus proving that haptic communication alone is sufficient for human-to-human dancing). Now they've progress to a human-robot dance in which the human communicates with a robot arm haptically. The robot or the human can lead. Read more in the MIT press release. Or for the full story see Sommer's research papers on Haptic-only lead and follow dancing and related subjects.