Dancing with a robot: The human leads

Abstract

Human-robot cooperation enables the robots to perform works in the uncertain environments and allow the robots to execute tasks according to the commands of humans who manage the environmental complexities. A new Dance Partner robot is introduced that acts as a female partner and realizes the ballroom dances in a coordination with a male human dancer by estimating his intention. The robot has a force-torque sensor that is installed between its upper body and lower body to measure human-leading force-moment. An omnidirectional mobile base uses special wheels to move along dance-step trajectories, as well as possesses two arms, each with four degrees of freedom and a neck joint with one of two submodules. The Step Estimator estimates the dance steps intended by the human according to his lead in transition and the module uses Hidden Markov Models (HMM) to estimate the steps by stochastically modeling the time series of the leading force moment.