Haptic dancing: Human performance at haptic decoding with a vocabulary

The inspiration for this study is the observation that swing dancing involves coordination of actions between two humans that can be accomplished by pure haptic signaling. This study implements a leader-follower dance to be executed between a human and a PHANToM haptic robotic device. The data demonstrate that the participants’ understanding of the motion as a random sequence of known moves informs their following, making this type of interaction fundamentally different from closed-loop pursuit tracking.