While I was looking into animatronics technology for the new issue of Make:, I happened to attend a talk by Dr. Catie Cuan a pioneer in the new field of “choreobotics.” Trained as an engineer and as a professional dancer, she programs robots to perform routines that are abstract, graceful, and beautiful. Intrigued, I reached out and we chatted about the art and science of robotic motion.
—Keith Hammond

So, robot choreography, it’s not a common job! How did you get into this?

I got a consulting job out of college, had interned at Google, but was a dancer and always wanted to do that. I became a professional dancer at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in New York, and built mobile apps and websites during the day. I began to add video and virtual reality to my dance work, and then started thinking about adding dimensionality — how to interact with technology on the stage in three dimensions. That led me to robots.

Then professor Amy LaViers, a researcher in choreographic interfaces at Brown University, invited me to be artist-in-residence at her lab. That really changed everything for me.

The second thing was, my Dad had a stroke in 2014 and while in the hospital, he felt very alienated by all the machines. I thought, Why don’t artists design all these high-touch, human-facing tools? Artists understand emotion better than anyone.

So I applied to grad school, got a Ph.D. at Stanford, and now it’s a field — teaching robots to dance, formalizing the connection between choreography and robotics.

Animatronics is considered the art of making a machine express “lifelike characteristics” — a mechatronic version of puppetry, a kind of mimicry. But we can go further. From simple to more complex, I think of basic compliance, where robots just have to move safely and not confuse people. Then there’s expression, where body language sends an emotional message — intentions, moods, confusion or understanding, friendliness or aloofness — like the robots we see in movies. What you’re doing goes even further. It’s evocative or abstract motion — artistic, not sending a literal message. Using body language but also going beyond it to evoke a feeling, like dance.

Animators have been thinking about these things for some time — proportions, shapes, sizes, sequences of motion. The difference is choreographers are trained to think about the full context of those motions — what comes before and after, all the interactions with other bodies, what kinds of movement vocabularies don’t have obvious literal interpretations but still evoke emotion — and then translate that across different types of bodies.

Dancers are attuned to many subtleties that people notice but can’t articulate. For example, when I go to pick up this water bottle, I: change my gaze to look at it, change the orientation of my head, change my shoulders slightly, reach for the object with an efficient reach, lift and pull it toward me. Choreographers know how to articulate all that. A robot that looks away while reaching the object — that’s immediately creepy, uncomfortable. I no longer trust that robot. A robot that does look at the bottle but moves its arm in the most efficient way — grip, lift straight up, pull back — also uncanny, it looks overdramatic and weird.

It’s innate human instinct to recognize body language and facial expressions. Robot motion can offend our sense of proper motion, it’s creepy. Like that new Boston Dynamics humanoid looks kinda human until you see it get up from the floor, moving its joints in horrible backward ways.

That humanoid is always going to be creepy! The litmus test is, Would I let this thing walk untethered, by itself, around my kid? If the answer to that is no — then it’s creepy or unsafe or strange. When I was at Everyday Robots, a bunch of kids ran around with the robots, got on top of them, and no one got hurt. You couldn’t do that with a Boston Dynamics robot, or any of these robots really. They’re not that stable, they’re heavy.

What do you want Make: readers to know about robot motion and choreography?

We are on the precipice of the most tremendous change in the way we experience our environment. Previously everything around us that moves — animals, trees in the wind — was part of nature. Robots are not part of nature. It’s an enormous change — we are extremely attuned to motion around us, because we’re animals, we used to get eaten. It’s like when personal computers moved from just military and academia into many other domains, they created the whole field of human-computer interaction — the psychology, interface design, all that. The same thing is happening now with robots — choreography, architecture, AI, medicine, “corobotics” in the workplace — robotics is moving into all these areas. This is the big transition we’re experiencing at the moment. In the future thousands of people will have this as their job — to understand how to choreograph robots to be around human beings.

We have an extraordinary opportunity with robots to build machines we actually want to be around. Our phones are great but they are 2-dimensional screens — robots are 3-dimensional, so the entire robot is an interface. You can have much more naturalistic interactions, and it’s up to us to decide what those interactions look like. We’re finding out that phones aren’t great for our body based experience; with robots we can broaden the funnel to include all kinds of new interactions!

What an opportunity! That makes me feel super optimistic. We can make choices that make humans feel alienated and disempowered, or that make us feel creative, expansive, embodied, and joyful. Wow, we can literally make those choices. It’s not a foregone conclusion that robots need to look a certain way, or move in certain ways. We can use our creativity to welcome different kinds of interactions with robots and build exciting new permutations.