Robotic Dancing, Emotional Gestures and Prosody: A Framework for Gestures of Three Robotic Platforms

The chapter explores two fundamental issues in sound and robotics. The first issues deals with the portrayal of emotional gestures through sound and how it can be achieved on different robot platforms. Three robot platforms are used in the study: Stretch, Panda, and SeekerBot. A comparative approach was developed to map human gestures to robots of similar physiology. Emotional musical prosody was used to generate sounds, and user studies were conducted to evaluate the impact of emotional gesture and prosody generators across the three robotic platforms for animacy, anthropomorphism, likeability, and perceived intelligence. The study aims to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the manner in which different robotic platforms and approaches for gesture generation alter common human-robot interaction metrics and the portrayal of emotion, and a guideline for mapping human gestures to non-humanoid robots. The second topic involves using the developed framework for longer form dance to music. A seven-degree-of-freedom robotic arm was used as the non-humanoid robot, and the gestures or dance movements were designed to respond to music in a way that corresponds to human perception of expressed emotion. The robot will appear to be improvising and designing its own dance based on the music. The mapping between musical features and a single robot's gestures as well as accompanying gestures of additional robots was created based on Burger's research on correlations between different musical elements and various body motions.