Towards an Interactive Framework for Robot Dancing Applications

In this paper we present the architecture for a robotic system using a humanoid robot, based on the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which tries to simulate the human rhythmic perception from audio signals, and its reactive behavior in the form of dance. To do so we implemented lowlevel aspects of rhythm perception based on Marsyas, an open source software framework for audio processing. The model’s output is sent to the robot control application in real-time, via sockets, shaped in three rhythmic events, representing soft, medium and strong onsets in the music. The dance movements can be dynamically defined trough an interactive interface and are performed by the robot in a reactive manner to these rhythmic events’ occurrence. These movements also depend on two kinds of sensorial events, namely the color stepped on the floor or the proximity to some kind of obstacle. This interactive robot control keeps the dynamism manifested by the human behavior, granting spontaneous and dynamic dance movements in synchronism to music, without any previous knowledge of it. Index Terms — Acoustic applications, Acoustic signal analysis, Interactive systems, Multimedia systems, Music, Robot dynamics, Robots