When we were researching animatronic technology for a new issue make:Last year, I happened to attend a talk by Dr. Katie Quan, a pioneer in the emerging field of choreobotics. Trained as both an engineer and a professional dancer, she programs robots to perform abstract, graceful, and beautiful routines. Intrigued, I reached out to discuss the art and science of robotic movement.
—Keith Hammond
Choreographing robots is not a very common job! How did you get into it?
After college, I got a consulting job and interned at Google, but I was a dancer first and always wanted to be a dancer. I became a professional dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in New York and built mobile apps and websites during the day. I started incorporating video and virtual reality into my dance work, and then I started thinking about adding volume – how to interact with technology onstage in three dimensions. That led me to robots.
So the professor Amy LaViarsA researcher in choreography interfaces at Brown University invited me to be an artist in residence. In her labIt really changed everything for me.
Secondly, my father had a stroke in 2014 and while he was in the hospital he felt very alienated surrounded by machines. I thought, “Why don’t artists design these tools that humans interact with? Artists understand emotions better than anyone.”
So I applied to grad school, got my PhD at Stanford, and now I’m working on teaching robots to dance and formalizing the connection between choreography and robotics.
Animatronics is considered the art of making machines express “life-like characteristics”. It’s the mechatronic version of puppetry, a kind of imitation. But we can go even further. From simple to complex, I think of basic compliance, which is that the robot moves safely and does not confuse people. Then there is expression, which is sending emotional messages with body language (intention, mood, confusion or understanding, friendliness or aloofness), like the robots in the movies. What you’re doing is going even further. It’s not sending literal messages, it’s artistic, evocative or abstract movement. It’s not just using body language, it’s going beyond that to evoke emotions, like dance.
Animators have been thinking about these things for a long time: proportions, shapes, sizes, movement sequences, etc. The difference is that choreographers are trained to think about the entire context of those movements — what happens before and after, interactions with other bodies, what movement vocabulary doesn’t have a clear literal interpretation but evokes emotion — and then translating that across different types of bodies.
Dancers are sensitive to a lot of subtle differences that people notice but can’t express in words. For example, when I go to pick up this water bottle, I shift my gaze to look at the bottle, I turn my head, I move my shoulders slightly, and I efficiently reach out and grab the object, lift it up and pull it toward me. Choreographers know how to express all of that. A robot that looks away while reaching for an object immediately feels creepy and uncomfortable. I don’t trust that robot anymore. A robot that looks at the bottle but moves its arms in the most efficient way possible — grabbing the bottle, lifting it straight up and pulling it back — also seems creepy, exaggerated and weird.
It’s an innate human instinct to recognize body language and facial expressions. Robotic movements can offend our sense of correct movement. That’s creepy. Boston Dynamics’ new humanoid looks human until it rises from the floor and moves its joints in a terrifyingly backward motion.
That humanoid has always been creepy! The litmus test is, would you let this robot walk around kids, untethered, on its own? If the answer is no, it’s creepy, dangerous, or weird. When I was at Everyday Robots, lots of kids ran around with the robots and climbed on them and no one got hurt. You can’t do that with a Boston Dynamics robot, or any other robot for that matter. They’re not very stable and they’re heavy.
What would you like readers of “Make:” to know about robot movement and choreography?
We are on the brink of the biggest change in the way we experience our environment. Before, everything that moved around us was part of nature – animals, trees swaying in the wind. Robots are not part of nature. This is a huge change – we are animals, we were fed, and so we are very sensitive to the movements around us. When personal computers moved from the military and academic fields to many other domains, the whole field of human-computer interaction was born: psychology, interface design, etc. The same thing is happening now with robots – choreography, architecture, AI, medicine, “corobotics” in the workplace – robotics is moving into all these fields. This is the big shift we are experiencing now. In the future, thousands of people will have the job of figuring out how to choreograph robots around humans.
Robots are an amazing opportunity to create machines that we actually want to be around. Cell phones are great, but they’re two-dimensional screens. Robots are three-dimensional, so the whole robot is the interface. It allows for more natural interactions, and it’s up to us to decide what those interactions will be. We’ve found that cell phones aren’t suited to our body-based experiences. With robots, we can widen the funnel to include all kinds of new interactions.
What an opportunity! I feel so optimistic. Humans can choose to feel alienated and powerless, or they can choose to feel creative, expansive, embodied and joyful. Amazing, we literally have the choice. It doesn’t take for granted that a robot needs to look or move in a certain way. We can use our creativity to welcome different interactions with robots and build exciting new combinations.
