Synthesis of expressive movement

Abstract

We present experiments concerning the use of mobile robots in music theatre artistic productions.The paper focuses on the development of techniques for expressive movement synthesis and on their hardware and software implementation in concrete human-robot and human-virtual characters interaction.Different kinds of synthesis of expressive content in movement are considered: (i) Expressive content conveyed through the movement of robots and interacting with them (e.g.robots interacting with dancers, artists, musicians on a stage): a particular focus will be on the expressiveness raising not only from the movement of a robot (i.e. its style of movement), but also from a global, multimodal interaction between a robot and an artist (e.g. a music performer or a dancer).The integration of music and movement is also a crucial issues presented in the paper.(ii) Expressive utilisation of mobile scenery in music theatre applications.Research on synthesis of expressive movement will take advantage from the results obtained in our Labs on the analysis of expressiveness in human movement and dance.Experiments based on small mobile robots (the Pioneer 2 from Stanford Research Institute) are presented.The paper describes issues developed in a multimedia artistic production we partecipated with Virgilio Sieni Dance Company (L'Ala dei Sensi, Ferrara, November 1999).In particular, the interactive setup, the techniques, and the lessons learned in experimenting the developed system will be presented.