Structure design of a passive type dance partner robot

A wheeled passive type dance partner robot is developed. By dancing in cooperation with a human through direct physical interaction, the robot can train people to dance. Due to the existence of security issues in case of physical interaction with a human, a novel passive structure of robot is presented, which replaces the actuators such as motors used by active type robots with brakes, therefore, the robot can not move depending on itself, it can only move passively based on the force applied by human dancer, thus higher level of safety is guaranteed. By analyzing the steps of the male dancer with motion capture system, the locations of the robot's wheels are determined, which do not interfere with the human dancer and can minimize the motion resistance. Furthermore, the dynamic manipulability is utilized to analyze the motion capabilities of the robot so that the orientations of the wheels can be determined. Finally, a prototype is presented, whose structure is demonstrated to be feasible by actual experiment of dancing with the author.