GA Tech Dancing, Rapping Robots Showcase Saturday On Campus

ATLANTA, GA — Georgia Tech students are combining robotics and dance to put on a special performance Saturday exhibiting the close ties to be reached between technology and the arts.

“Forest: A Robot & Human Experience Through Sound” is a year-ending performance by musicians, dancers and robots that will present a merging of disciplines on the Institute’s campus this weekend.

Student programmers taught robotic manufacturing arms to move in synch with music and dance choreography. The result will be on display Saturday at 7:30 p.m., at the John and Joyce Caddell Building, 280 Ferst Drive, Atlanta. The show will be viewed from outside the building through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows.

“The big thing we really wanted to focus on was capturing natural emotion,” said music technology graduate student Amit Rogel. “One of my main challenges was to make the robot look as if it’s moving like a human.”

But programming each of the dozen or more robotic arms was no small task, initially, he said.

“Just to get one to move up and down took me like four hours at first,” Rogel said. “Now I can program whole moves in like 30 minutes.”

But the challenge comes when you have to coordinate those movements with ever-changing musical choices and dance moves, he said.

“We worked on interactive styles like a translator for the dancers and for the robots,” Rogel said.

He described dancers from the group’s first show at Kennesaw State University who were nervous to interact with the robots, “until one accidentally bumped into one of the robot arms and it reacted. The dancer was able to use the robot’s response to create a new movement for their dance,” Rogel said.

Richard Savery, a 2021 doctoral graduate of the music technology program who wrote the grant that garnered funding from the National Science Foundation, said the interaction between humans and robots has practical implications.

“We can learn how robots can respond to humans in the workplace, making them better partners,” Savery said.

An added bonus for the show is the robot Shimon, who is programmed to engage in freestyle rap battles with musician Dashill A. Smith.

“It’s been great. They’re interacting and developing a vocabulary together,” Savery said in a Georgia Tech research article. “I was really interested in this idea of improvising with a human, and most of that collaboration happens when you’re on stage.”

After Saturday’s show, the performance will travel to Israel to collaborate with a dance troupe there, Tech officials said. Gil Weinberg, founder and director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology, said the teaming of artistry and robotics is a big draw.

“It was fascinating to see how choreographers and dancers who are not surrounded by technology on a daily basis learn to trust and slowly build a relationship with our robotic artists,” Weinberg said. “When you bring this kind of interesting, interdisciplinary work together and merge different disciplines, it hopefully will inspire new advances in the fields of dance, music, and robotics.”