Synthesis of an interactive haptic dancing partner

This paper studies dancing as a haptic interaction task with the aim of replacing one of the human dancing partners by an interactive robot. Starting from haptic recordings of human dancing couples, the interactive behavior of a male dancing partner is synthesized. For this purpose recorded dancing steps are approximated using multiple vector fields and faded into each other by simply switching between them. Adaptation to the female style of dancing is realized by implementing an adaptation law which changes the step size of the robot. Experimental results performed on a mobile haptic interface show the validity of the presented approach.