Researchers are constantly working on new ways to make robots more suitable for working with a human partner. CoDance explores the idea of teaching robots such skills from videos of 2 people dancing. The robot learns to follow a partner and respond compliantly through its hands, and keep the movement style of the dance. As the researchers explain, thanks to this framework, robots can sustain two-hand dancing with a humanoid partner that involves forward and backward motions.
Here is how the researchers pulled it off:
a multi-link compliance augmentation that transforms the kinematic demonstration into force-aware training data by adapting the robot reference under structured forces at both hands. Policies trained on this data follow the observed partner while preserving the demonstrated locomotion style and responding compliantly to physical interaction.
[HT]
