UMBC researchers use Indian dance to improve robotic hand movement learning

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 10:54:17 -0500
ai, hand-gestures, mita, robot, robotics

UMBC Professor Ramana Vinjamuri and his students used Bharatanatyam Mudras, Indian classical dance hand gestures, to help train and evaluate their system for recognizing and modeling human hand gestures. The work is described in the article, Reconstructing hand gestures with synergies extracted from dance movements, published in Nature Scientific Reports.

The gestures were successfully mapped onto Mitra, a humanoid robot with five-degree-of-freedom hands developed by a company led by Balaji Viswanathan, '23 Ph.D. Computer Science. This work demonstrates the potential of dance-inspired structured learning in enhancing dexterity, rehabilitation, and motor control, enabling more efficient gesture-based interaction models in robotics, prosthetics, and rehabilitation.
Read more about this research here.