Tutorial: Revealing the Meaning of Bodily Expression of Human Counterparts for Robots Using Dance Theory and Human-annotated Benchmark Datasets

Cat Maguire will lead a day long tutorial (with Amy LaViers) as part of the Arts and Robotics special track at ICRA (International Conference on Robotics and Automation) in Atlanta, USA, May 23rd, 2025 highlighting motif and notational abstractions of movement.

How do we make a machine that indicates changes to its internal state, e.g., goals, attitude, or even emotion, through changes in movement profiles?

This workshop will pose a possible direction toward such ends that leverages movement notation as a source for clearly defining abstract concepts of similarity and symbolic representation of the parts and patterns of movement – in order to identify, record and interpret patterns of human movement on both the micro and macro levels. First, we will move together. This will activate an innate ability to imitate each other and, in doing so, illuminate the principal components of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies and the Body, Effort, Shape, Space, and Time (BESST) System of movement analysis. Next, we will try to write down what we’re doing. A set of symbols for describing elements of the BESST System, which seem to be particularly perceptually meaningful to human observers, will be presented so that movement ideas can be notated and, thus, translated between bodies. We will explore both Labanotation and a related ”motif”-style notation. This workshop is supported by NSF award #2234196.