Haptic dancing: human performance at haptic decoding with a vocabulary

The inspiration for this study is the observation that swing dancing involves coordination of actions between two humans that can be accomplished by pure haptic signaling. This study implements a leaderfollower dance to be executed between a human and a PHANToM haptic device. The data demonstrate that the participants’ understanding of the motion as a random sequence of known moves informs their following, making this vocabulary-based interaction fundamentally different from closed loop pursuit tracking. This robot leader does not respond to the follower’s movement other than to display error from a nominal path. This work is the first step in an investigation of the successful haptic coordination between dancers, which will inform a subsequent design of a truly interactive robot leader.