Translating Cultural Choreography from Humanoid Forms to Robotic Arm

TL;DR

This paper presents ROPERA, a pipeline for translating culturally meaningful choreography into robotic arm movements, ensuring semantic fidelity and portability across different robotic morphologies.

Contribution

The study introduces a symbolic posture transfer method that preserves cultural semantics on a robotic arm and remains adaptable across various robot designs.

Findings

Reproducible execution of cultural postures with timing and legibility

Effective preservation of cultural semantics in robotic choreography

Potential for portable and non-anthropocentric cultural preservation

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.