Autonomous robot dancing synchronized to musical rhythmic stimuli

This paper presents a system that is able to control in real time a humanoid robot to perform dance movements to the rhythm of a music. The movements' coordination is performed with the aid of a music analyzer that estimates the beat of the music and calculates a prediction of the next inter-beat-interval (IBI). During the robot dancing performance, a dance movement is chosen from a pre-defined dance library and is executed on-the-fly by the robot. The movements' velocity, as well as the attended metrical-level, are adjusted in real time so that the movement can be executed within the time interval of two beats, and at the same time taking into consideration the robot motor-rates limitations. Results evince a good synchrony of the movement towards the analyzed rhythm, but points to the need of a careful design of the dance movements so they can be naturally executed on time.