Robot Choreography: The Use of the Kinetography Laban System to Notate Robot Action and Motion

Roboticists aim at segmenting robot actions into a sequence of motion primitives in order to simplify the robot programming phase. Choreographers aim at capturing the essence of human body movements within a sequence of symbols that can be understood by dancers. To that extent, roboticists and choregraphers pursue the same quest. This paper reports a pluridisciplinary approach combining a dance notation system (the Kinetography Laban) with a robot programming system (the Stack of Task). Motion scores are used instead of quantitative data to compare and enlighten differences in robot and human movements. We then discuss about plausible origins of these differences taking into account the implicit rules of the Kinetography Laban on how a movement is executed by humans. This comparison, in the light of the Kinetography Laban, opens some challenging questions related to motion segmentation and motion naturalness.