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Translating Cultural Choreography from Humanoid Forms to Robotic Arm

Chelsea-Xi Chen, Zhe Zhang, Aven-Le Zhou

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of preserving cultural semantics in robotic arm choreography by moving beyond pure trajectory imitation. It introduces ROPERA, a three-stage symbolic posture transfer framework that maps codified cultural postures into joint-space-compatible representations for a $6$-DOF robotic arm. Using Kunqu opera's The Peony Pavilion as a test case, it builds a genre-specific pose vocabulary, encodes a temporally annotated symbolic sequence, and decodes it to servo commands with timing fidelity, complemented by a visual layer. Results show reproducible timing and cultural legibility, with audience feedback supporting non-anthropocentric cultural preservation and portability across platforms. The work provides a portable authoring workflow and a foundation for extending to locomotion and multi-platform deployment.

Abstract

Robotic arm choreography often reproduces trajectories while missing cultural semantics. This study examines whether symbolic posture transfer with joint space compatible notation can preserve semantic fidelity on a six-degree-of-freedom arm and remain portable across morphologies. We implement ROPERA, a three-stage pipeline for encoding culturally codified postures, composing symbolic sequences, and decoding to servo commands. A scene from Kunqu opera, \textit{The Peony Pavilion}, serves as the material for evaluation. The procedure includes corpus-based posture selection, symbolic scoring, direct joint angle execution, and a visual layer with light painting and costume-informed colors. Results indicate reproducible execution with intended timing and cultural legibility reported by experts and audiences. The study points to non-anthropocentric cultural preservation and portable authoring workflows. Future work will design dance-informed transition profiles, extend the notation to locomotion with haptic, musical, and spatial cues, and test portability across platforms.

Translating Cultural Choreography from Humanoid Forms to Robotic Arm

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of preserving cultural semantics in robotic arm choreography by moving beyond pure trajectory imitation. It introduces ROPERA, a three-stage symbolic posture transfer framework that maps codified cultural postures into joint-space-compatible representations for a -DOF robotic arm. Using Kunqu opera's The Peony Pavilion as a test case, it builds a genre-specific pose vocabulary, encodes a temporally annotated symbolic sequence, and decodes it to servo commands with timing fidelity, complemented by a visual layer. Results show reproducible timing and cultural legibility, with audience feedback supporting non-anthropocentric cultural preservation and portability across platforms. The work provides a portable authoring workflow and a foundation for extending to locomotion and multi-platform deployment.

Abstract

Robotic arm choreography often reproduces trajectories while missing cultural semantics. This study examines whether symbolic posture transfer with joint space compatible notation can preserve semantic fidelity on a six-degree-of-freedom arm and remain portable across morphologies. We implement ROPERA, a three-stage pipeline for encoding culturally codified postures, composing symbolic sequences, and decoding to servo commands. A scene from Kunqu opera, \textit{The Peony Pavilion}, serves as the material for evaluation. The procedure includes corpus-based posture selection, symbolic scoring, direct joint angle execution, and a visual layer with light painting and costume-informed colors. Results indicate reproducible execution with intended timing and cultural legibility reported by experts and audiences. The study points to non-anthropocentric cultural preservation and portable authoring workflows. Future work will design dance-informed transition profiles, extend the notation to locomotion with haptic, musical, and spatial cues, and test portability across platforms.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 21 sections, 1 equation, 5 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. ROPERA framework
  4. Kunqu Opera and Peony Pavilion
  5. Related Work
  6. Motion Aesthetics and Expressivity
  7. Cultural Posture Translation and Symbolic Abstraction
  8. Notation frameworks for Robotic Posture Encoding
  9. ROPERA Framework Overview
  10. Encoding Preparation
  11. Sequence Encoding
  12. Decoding and Execution
  13. Experiment: From Peony Pavilion to Robotic Arm Choreography
  14. Kunqu Opera Encoding Preparation: Genre-based Pose Vocabulary and Mapping
  15. Data Collection and Motion Primitive Extraction
  16. ...and 6 more sections

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: Overview of the ROPERA three-stage framework
  • Figure 2: Sequence design, decoding and execution based on The Peony Pavilion
  • Figure 3: 15 motion primitives in Kunqu Opera
  • Figure 4: Joint mapping strategy from human to robot for head, gesture, height of center of mass, and rotation
  • Figure 5: Symbolic notation and execution corresponding to Eq. \ref{['eq:notation']} and Listing \ref{['lst:exec']}.