IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2017 - 24

By
Katianne
Williams

Shall We

Dance?

EntEring
thE world
of roBot
chorEography

©Rose eichenbaum

Back in the 1980s, Margo Apostolos was at Stanford working toward her Ph.D. degree in physical education with a minor in philosophy. She was a dancer-she holds an M.A. degree in dance from Northwestern University-and decided to audit a mechanical engineering course, one that happened to be taught
by Larry J. Leifer.
In 1965, when he was a student at Stanford, Leifer and partner Victor Scheinman had developed a very
early prototype for a computer-controlled robotic arm, and Leifer's career had included a strong interest
in developing human-friendly rehabilitation technologies. One day, after the class had watched a video of
robots working along an assembly line, Apostolos raised her hand and, as she says, meekly asked the question: "Why can't the robots move more gracefully?" Leifer was intrigued by her question, and he invited
her to work in his lab to investigate just that.
Apostolos' days in the Physical Education Department had been full of academic rigor-she had studied anatomy, biomechanics, and kinesiology; worked with cadavers; and had taken multiple semesters of
statistics. She brought all of this knowledge to the lab, along with her years of experience as both a dancer
and a teacher of dance. Her time there was "the real essence" of interdisciplinary work, which, as Apostolos
explains it, means everyone "left their egos at the door." The engineers knew nothing about dance, and she
knew nothing about engineering-the two learned from each other. Her passion had always been movement, and robots took this passion to another dimension.
She had thought she would write her dissertation on "Dance for Sport," but she was swayed
by the world of robots. This was the 1980s and robotics was a tricky subject at the time.
Robots were futuristic-there weren't too many cell phones around, there was an Internet
but no World Wide Web, and personal computers weren't yet in the majority of households.
For scholars, there wasn't even much literature on robotics to review; it hadn't been created
yet. Apostolos was forward-thinking, and she would end up writing her dissertation on the
idea of user acceptance-if robots could move more gracefully, would people be more willing
to accept them?
She worked on robot choreography. Each robot came with its own programming lanMargo Apostolos
guage, and Apostolos would learn what she needed to get the robot to perform the motions.
There were challenges, of course, in bringing a human aspect to an inanimate object. While
robots had six degrees of freedom, any limitations still had to be overcome with programming.

Happy Feet
StarDance and FreeFlight: these are two of the dance choreographs Apostolos developed. They can be
found on YouTube, from old, grainy VHS videotapes-a backlit robot twisting, turning, and pivoting.
They're captivatingly graceful-and not in a graceful-for-a-robot kind of way.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MWIE.2017.2675119
Date of publication: 9 May 2017

IEEE womEn In EngInEErIng magazInE

June 2017

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