Engineers are developing robots that can dance, hoping to blend the worlds of technology and choreography for good. The robots are already challenging what we know about the art of movement. After these robots learn to dance, they will perform at your next concert.

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cozy night in a living room at Brown University had a lot of unspoken stakes. Professor and choreographer Sydney Skybetter invited his friend, dancer Catie Cuan, and about a dozen engineers to Brown under the guise of sharing brewskis and having a light conversation. At the time, almost 10 years ago, the first generation of the Apple Watch had just been released. In his eyes, the watch started a more significant trend of developing devices that mimic and surveil the human body. To him, and other dance scholars, it sounded like choreography through the mimicking and tracking of human movement.

They thought that tech companies having so much information on human movement was unethical. They wanted to use this information for good: an opportunity for art innovation and to improve the livelihoods of people. However, they left the meeting with putting the name “Choreorobotics” on their biggest project yet: dancing robots. No one ever thought the term would make it out of that room, let alone have the potential to change the art of dance forever.

The dance world has modernized but hasn’t taken a significant technological leap. Since the early 2010s, digital culture has transformed the dance industry by creating social media platforms for its artists outside the stages and companies. Selecting dancers has been replaced by the progression of in-class footage and 30-second TikTok videos. The internet is a dancer’s stage.

Technological advancements similar to robotics and virtual reality have yet to be widespread in the industry. There’s still a boundary between man and machine. However, that boundary could be erased with the mainstream addition of these robots.

In this video you can learn about the different types of robots.

Robots Can Move As We Do

Cuan was determined to explore what choreographers could not imagine — the emotional connection between dance and robotics. Choreographing was more difficult than programming the robots. She says that choreography is the formal recognition of movement, which humans experience daily.

To choreo-roboticists like Cuan, choreography is more than a treasured practice within dance studios worldwide.

“Movement is very evocative for human beings,” Cuan said. “We know from various studies that anything that moves has intrinsic meaning to human beings.”

Cuan suggests that everything we interact with has an inherent rhythm. Whether that's opening a car door or brushing our teeth, these rhythms surround us and affect how we view the world.

However, Cuan was not the first to discover the connection between dance and technology. In the early 1980s, the University of Southern California Director of Dance, Margo Apostolos, a pioneer of choreorobotics, tested the boundaries of what dance could be.

At their roots, choreography and robotic engineering are both sequences of movements involving repetition and mimicking. Apostolos knew the intersection of dance and robotics would help with cultural expansion within the field of art and eventually become more common in the dance field.

This interactive timeline offers a more in-depth look at choreorobotics' intriguing history:

Apostolos had ensured that the integrity of dance was not in jeopardy. To her, a dancer’s role could never be replaced.

“I remember being at the NYU at a conference, and the dance community shunned me,” Apostolos said. “Someone approached me and said, ’You are trying to take the work away from the dancers.’ They thought I was trying to replace the dancers with robots.”

For Apostolos, these robots are dancers themselves. While working with the robots in a small basement lab at the USC School of Engineering, she often checked in on them as if they were dancers preparing for a performance. She referred to duct tape holding some of their loose parts together as “bandages.” To a passerby, it would sound like she was talking to a human.

While other roboticists may not view their machines in a humanistic way, robot choreographers have remarked that this technology, while not novel, has allowed them to push the boundaries of their creativity.

In the video USC Director of Dance Margo Apostolos and engineer Yuyi Chen show the dancing robots they are developing in the robotics lab.

Robots In The Real World

Before working with robots, Catie Cuan started as a dancer and choreographer. Her first-ever duet partner was her older sister, who helped her choreograph pieces to show their family at gatherings in her living room. Cuan remarked as dancing has always been a way for Cuan to connect with her Cuban heritage. Growing up, her dad often told her that if she didn’t dance or engage with music, “You aren’t Cuban.”

Cuan is trained in multiple dance disciplines, such as contemporary and ballet. She has always been interested in robots, but easily accessible robots were unavailable to experiment with her interest. It wasn’t until 2015 that she had access to some hackable Roombas, small drones, and finally, the industrial Baxter robot. Now Cuan had the chance to put her movement into a machine. Standing about two and a half feet high, the Baxter robot was Cuan’s first memorable nonhuman duet partner.

Cuan programmed the robot to perform a simple routine while she danced around it. That moment was beyond transcendent for her. Cuan felt as if she was not only connected to this machine but to an ancestral lineage of technological progression.

“I felt like I had collapsed this sort of space-time continuum, and I’d imbued myself into this machine,” Cuan said. “For me, it felt like it put me on this long trajectory of my ancestors from 10,000 or 15,000 years ago, who used wooden and stone tools all the way up until my compatriots now who were wielding silica and whatever they wanted.”

At the heart of this emerging technology are dancers, choreographers, and artists. Their artistry is just translated into a machine.

Another of these artists is Kate Ladenheim. Ladenheim started through artist-in-residency at the RadLabDuring her residency, she created the ‘Baby Face’ project, which was an artistic response to the “gender tropes” in the design of robots. She noticed how robots developed for tasks relating to service always had a feminine aspect about them. At that moment, creativity struck.

“I was struck by how bots are always feminine voices, and they were always for service,” Ladenheim said. “It was a big point of people responding better to female voices from robots and cute, adorable features.”

Ladenheim translated the concept of gender through automated wings. The wing extensions were built with an estimate for measuring breath that used pressure sensors around the dancers' ribcage. When the dancer inhaled, the wings would expand. When the dancer exhaled, the wings contracted. The wings’ movement, Ladenheim states, is a metaphor for our conscious or unconscious control over other people’s perceptions of us.

“Breath was the mediation between my body and the machine, but also a mediation between the physical causation of the choreography and also the concepts that we were working with,” Ladenheim said.

This technology is expanding beyond the walls of select universities’ research labs. Just this past June, Beyonce went viral for using robot arms while performing her song ‘COZY’ on the European leg of her Renaissance world tour. The arms framed Beyonce to her movements as she danced around the stage.

In online videos, Beyoncé performs the song’s vogue and ballroom-esque choreography in the center of two shiny, silver metal arms that tower over her. The arms spun two rectangle-shaped arms in semi-circles around Beyonce as she and her other background dancers performed the choreography. This performance gave roboticists a glimpse into the innovative future their work is pushing for.

Check out this vox pop to hear what dancers think about dancing robots.

The Integrity of Dance

Dancers in the industry had an entirely different response. Many dancers and choreographers were less concerned about integrating robots than preserving dance. Due to the disconnect between professional dancers and the world of robotics, artists have yet to be able to consider a robot as an actual dance partner.

“Robots cannot convey the emotion that other humans can,” commercial dancer Hero Thomas said. “I think it's cool that they can incorporate that because all it does is evaluate the performances. But in replacing dancers … No, realistically, humans feed off of other people's energy.

Unfortunately for professional dancers, performances generated from artificial intelligence and technology have, in some cases, been shown to attract the attention of audience members more. Stanford University researchers have developed an AI model called Editable Dance Generation (EDGE) that can choreograph dance animation to match any music.

“Our hypothesis is that the audiences sometimes preferred synthetic dances because EDGE has the ability to generate more energetic and fast-moving dances,” said Professor of computer science Karen Liu.

Dance practice for centuries has connected physically created bonds between individuals. It’s an art form of nonverbal communication centered around the lived experiences of humans. For dancers, the main issue with dancing robots is the emotional barrier that only a physical human can experience.

However, choreo-roboticists like Skybetter argue that “integrity” is something that hasn’t existed in the dance industry.

“It's hard for me to imagine the dance field as having integrity because it doesn't have a stable core,” Skybetter said. ”It's always been precarious, it's always been imploding, it's always been iniquitous and always privileged.”

Skybetter, and other choreo-roboticists, are not interested in maintaining the status quo of dance.

Listen to experts' perspectives on robots.

The Robot's Future Has Two Legs

The widespread addition of dancing robots is a future still in development. Mainly, robots are widely inaccessible and expensive. Even to be put on a stage, technology similar to Beyonce’s robot arms can cost upwards of $100,000 per arm.

USC engineers aim to get their robots from four to two legs. The 3-foot, two-legged dancer, as Apostolos describes, is still developing, but it already has on its dancing shoes: a pair of navy blue toddler-sized Converse.

However, dancing is just the start. Through this work, they hope to push the boundaries of technology and develop more advanced robots to help make everyday life more convenient.

In the future, engineers, with the help of choreographers, hope to have their robots be able to dance among human performers, taking on an artistic personality of their own. Robots and humans could interact on stage, communicating with each other and the audience. But, realistically, dancing robots change how we view and receive the art of dance performance.

If made responsibly, this change could be positive. The ongoing debate about robots on stage is summed up in how we want our future to look. Roboticists like Cuan believe in a future as imaginative and creative as technological development.

“It's much more about the underlying thesis of how you want to live and how you want to live as a human in a world where you use tools, but the tools also use you,” she says.

To stay up to date with the news in choreorobotics, follow the artists and engineers on social media:

@sydneyskybetter @catiecuan @laviers
@kateladenheim

If you want more information about choreorobotics, Sydney Skybetter’s new podcast, Dances with Robots, will be out on all streaming services by the end of August 2023.