Imitating human dance motions through motion structure analysis

This paper presents a method for importing human dance motion into humanoid robots through visual observation. The human motion data is acquired from a motion capture system consisting of 8 cameras and 8 PC clusters. Then the whole motion sequence is divided into motion elements and clustered into groups according to the correlation of end-effector trajectories. We call these segments 'motion primitives'. New dance motions are generated by concatenating these motion primitives. We are also trying to make a humanoid dance these original or generated motions using inverse-kinematics and dynamic balancing techniques.