{"id":12947,"date":"2013-09-30T13:18:48","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T17:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/systems\/?p=12947"},"modified":"2022-01-24T18:06:53","modified_gmt":"2022-01-24T23:06:53","slug":"dances-with-robots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/dances-with-robots\/","title":{"rendered":"Dances with Robots"},"content":{"rendered":"

Teaching automatons to figure out what needs to be done<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"dancers\"<\/a>As dancers, this couple is no Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The leader\u2019s moves are clunky, his partner\u2019s so tentative that she\u2019s constantly behind a beat. But be kind: they\u2019re beginners at salsa, and they\u2019re bedeviled by something Fred and Ginger never faced. They\u2019re robots.\u00a0Watch the\u00a0video<\/a>.<\/p>\n

H. Kayhan Ozcimder (ENG\u201911,\u201915), a dancer with the\u00a0Boston troupe Collage, has had the inelegant experience of dancing with one of these machines, which resemble a vacuum cleaner minus the hose. Ozcimder dreams of a more agile automaton someday, but for now he\u2019s pleased to have helped program these salsa-bots, proving that \u201cit\u2019s possible to do an art form in a robotic platform.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ozcimder is a graduate student in John Baillieul<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0Intelligent Mechatronics Lab, whose mission, says the College of Engineering mechanical engineering professor, is to give machines the ability to respond to their environment. The researchers began by mapping the coordinates of actual salsa dancers and programming the robots with four basic beginner moves (relying on his dancer\u2019s knowledge, Ozcimder suggested salsa as a simple starting point for the mechanized dance amateurs). The robots, which are outfitted with motion sensors, read each other\u2019s moves and respond according to the programming.<\/p>\n

Ozcimder thinks motion-reading robots might someday serve as useful tools for judging dance competitions (possibly bouncing Kirstie Alley even sooner from\u00a0Dancing with the Stars<\/em>), but Baillieul is hunting bigger game. He\u2019s not out to help \u201csome high school guy who had trouble getting a date, so you get a robot. The ultimate goal is to understand human reaction to gestures and how machines may react to gestures.\u201d That could enable robots to team with, and perhaps take over from, humans in hazardous jobs, from treacherous rescues to repairs in lethal environments (think the workers who plunged into the stricken\u00a0Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after the 2011 Japanese tsunami).<\/p>\n

The intelligent mechatronics lab is littered with things from dancing robots to flight vehicles. The work builds on an established fact of 21st-century life: computing machines will do more of the work. \u201cEveryday objects like automobiles have gone from almost entirely mechanically engineered things to being machines that are basically controlled at every level by computers,\u201d notes Baillieul. \u201cA typical automobile now has 100 or more microprocessors in it.\u201d’<\/p>\n

The challenge is to build machines that can perform tasks with some autonomy and respond in fluid situations they might not have been precisely programmed for, an instance where man still has it all over machines. Whereas human reaction is the child of several parents\u2014instinct, surely, but also the ability to learn from experience and sometimes override instinct\u2014robots are not yet agile enough to ignore their \u201cinstinct\u201d (programming). The solution, says Baillieul, is to give the machines sufficiently \u201cmassive experiential data sets\u201d that they can react to numerous situations.<\/p>\n

One avenue the lab is exploring is humans\u2019 use of nonverbal cues to communicate. Good dancers move seamlessly together, responding to each other\u2019s touch and motions; amateurs without experience reading each other\u2019s cues often come off looking stilted. Nonverbal cues can also be used to send misinformation; bats, for example, camouflage their motions so that they can sneak up on insect prey, a fake-out familiar to anyone who\u2019s tried to swat a pesky fly. Hence the lab\u2019s work with getting robots to use sensors to read each other\u2019s metal-body language, aimed at \u201chow you might program flying vehicles or mobile robots to do the right thing, in terms of communicating or not communicating through their motions,\u201d Baillieul says.<\/p>\n

Dance companies like Ozcimder\u2019s can rest easy; even he doesn\u2019t foresee automating human dancers out of a job. Robots may be geniuses at detecting footwork, body angles, and other technical metrics that go into a performance, but they can\u2019t judge the intangible artistic panache that might please an audience, like dancers\u2019 facial expressions.<\/p>\n

Ozcimder has bad news for our mechanized friends: intangibles make up half the judging criteria at a typical salsa competition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teaching automatons to figure out what needs to be done As dancers, this couple is no Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The leader\u2019s moves are clunky, his partner\u2019s so tentative that she\u2019s constantly behind a beat. But be kind: they\u2019re beginners at salsa, and they\u2019re bedeviled by something Fred and Ginger never faced. They\u2019re robots.\u00a0Watch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1500,"featured_media":35416,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[127],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1500"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12947"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35418,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12947\/revisions\/35418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}