About the Shop
This space lists the products we sell in our shop. Our offerings are aimed at inspiring and aiding choreography -- with humans and machines. Scroll through the images to browse visually or click on INDEX to browse via a text-based list. Click through to purchase on our Shopify site.
The RAD Lab is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Philadelphia that brings together artists and engineers for artmaking, research, and education grounded in the conviction that robotics and dance share the same roots — movement, time, body, mechanism, magic — and buoyed by the ideal that each field is fully realized only through the other.
Artmaking
We develop expressive robotic systems, expanding the palette of dance artists and contributing to the foundations of robotics, at the same time. Our gallery and residency program showcase and facilitate artists and engineers in sustained creative collaboration, producing work that neither field could make alone.
Read more about choreobotics, a field we are pioneering in a recent cover story by Dance Magazine.
Check out our past projects like Time to Compile and Babyface via the archive's index. Stop by and see a work-in-progress showing from our current artists-in-residence on July 18 at 4pm.
Education
We offer inroads to robotics through kinesthetic and creative channels — and teach engineers principles from dance and movement notation. Our public programming includes Story Hour for young children, summer camps for teens, and courses in movement analysis for adult learners.
Our April newsletter gives more details about these opportunities.
Our events calendar gives a view of upcoming classes, performances, and open hours.
Research
We study movement as a symbolic system — asking what it would mean to have a genuine grammar of the body, and what that grammar would make possible for both robotics and dance. Our work draws on movement analysis, notation theory, and expressive robot design, and has produced the first textbook on choreobotics, co-authored by RAD Lab members and published by MIT Press.
Our textbook on choreobotics is freely available on MIT Press's open-access platform.
Read more on our scholarly vision in this short essay or in this lengthy review article.
Team
The lab is directed by Amy LaViers and includes researchers-in-residence Cat Maguire and Ben Baker, educator-in-residence Xandalee Rivera, artists-in-residence Louisa Pancoast, Shenaia Turner, Nialah Wilson-Small, Darren Woodland Jr., Guilherme Zanchetta, interns Julie Zalalutdinov and Melissa Yin. Our executive and advisory boards spanning universities, nonprofits, and industry. We collaborate with researchers, engineers, and artists at institutions all over the world, including Penn State University, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies.
Funding
The RAD Lab is currently supported by charitable donations and an AI infrastructure grant from the National Science Foundation. Past work has been funded by the National Robotics Initiative, DARPA, NIST, manufacturing consortia, and charitable foundations.
Read more on our current AI infrastructure grant in Penn State's press release.
Our new public-facing space is entirely donor supported. Donate to support our work.