IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2011 - 87

A Formal Approach
to Phrase Generation

U

By Amy LaViers, Yushan Chen, Calin Belta,
and Magnus Egerstedt

PHOTO COURTESY OF WWW.ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/
ALEXANDR MITIUC

1070-9932/11/$26.00ª2011 IEEE

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nderstanding human behavior
is a goal in many disciplines:
behavioral psychology, neuroscience, robotics, computer
vision, artificial intelligence,
athletics, and dance, to name a few. Thus,
this article may be understood in terms
of a larger dialogue about how to represent human movement with a concise
parameterization. Formal methods for
verification can play a surprising role in
this discourse. We will ensure that our
system evolves according to specific
style-based guidelines in a framework
where verification methods become an
integral part of the system model itself.
Our system model describes human
movement, and our specifications control
this model, preventing it from entering disallowed and undesirable states. This allows
us to produce sequences of movements in a
unique style with particular emotive effects. Particularly, we draw inspiration from classical ballet
where the set of allowable movements is sparse and
highly formalized and where the particular style and
certain emotive interpretation of movement sequences
are tightly coupled.
Such a framework should cascade into the field of humanoid
robotics. The emotive content found in the formalized movements like
those in dance is also present in the casual, pedestrian gestures of everyday body language; furthermore, the high-level instructions required to
generate such a set of movements are a natural augmentation to basic robotic
task specification. An abstraction based on such principles could one day
allow humanoid robots to operate in dynamic environments amid social
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2011.942118
Date of publication: 13 September 2011

SEPTEMBER 2011

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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87



http://WWW.ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2011

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