Imagine humans without letters. Confined, constantly, to our bodies, we were not the same animal we are today. Writing is not only convenient, it is constitutive — it has shaped what we can think, what we can remember, what we can say to each other, what we can build across generations. Written language is not only a tool we use, it is part of what we are.
However, it is not all that we are. Consider movement. The body in time. Gesture, weight, impulse, rhythm, the transfer of force — and information — from one being to another. Movement is a symbolic system — one that encodes meaning, transmits culture, and carries knowledge that cannot be held any other way. But we have barely begun to formalize it. We have notation systems that are partial. Vocabularies that are discipline-specific. No shared grammar. No agreed alphabet. No way to know what is signal and what is noise.
At the RAD Lab, we believe that discovering the letters of movement is one of the most consequential intellectual projects available to humanity. We think it will take more than a century.
That is the long-horizon bet the RAD Lab is making. It is the reason this institution exists. Starting with a senior thesis at Princeton University seeking to understand the "primary colors" of dance to stints at the Universities of Virginia and Illinois through to our latest textbook on choreobotics, which outlines a system for notating movement and applying it to expressive robot design, this has been the guiding, burning question at the core of what we do.
We are not the first to sense the stakes. Choreographers have spent a century reaching toward notation systems precise enough to preserve and transmit complex movement. Roboticists have spent decades trying to program machines that move in human spaces — and keep discovering that the problem is harder than it looks, because movement is not just energetic. It is entropic.
These two communities have been working on the same problem from opposite ends. They have rarely been in the same room.
The RAD Lab was founded on the conviction that robotics and dance share the same roots — movement, time, body, mechanism, magic — and that each field is fully realized only through the other. That conviction is not a metaphor. It has led the design of our organization.
The urgency is new, even if the problem is old. Human-facing robots and embodied AI systems are arriving — in hospitals, homes, schools, warehouses, public spaces. They will move among us. They will need to speak the language of the body.
What do we want that to look like? The answer depends entirely on how deeply we understand movement as a symbolic system. A machine trained only on motion capture data will — at best, fail to integrate in human-facing contexts and at worst, require humans to adapt to its alphabet, changing what is salient and how and what movements are translated. It will lack what a trained dancer has: a palette humans already relate to. A sense of which gestures mean something, and which are available for new meaning to be developed. An understanding of what the body is.
The problem is not the quantity of examples. A library of motion capture data, however vast, remains a library of instances — recordings of particular bodies in particular moments. Instances cannot be transmitted, only replicated. What allows movement to be taught, varied, and made meaningful across contexts is a symbolic layer: something that represents the work rather than any single performance of it. Letters, not recordings. Without that layer, there is nothing to build on — only an ever-larger archive that no one can read.
We are at the moment when the letters are yet to be discovered, but the machines are already being built. The field of dance has crucial knowledge. The field of robotics has expectant tools and the requisite urgency (funding). Neither can do this alone, and neither has historically committed to doing it together.
This work cannot live in a university department. Robotics and dance do not share a dean. They do not share a hiring committee, a tenure clock, or a theory of what counts as scholarship. The institutional structures that govern both fields are precisely the structures that have kept them apart.
It cannot live in a series of sporadic short-term collaborations or residencies, either. Those are valuable, but they are not sufficient for generational work. Discovering the letters of movement requires accumulated knowledge, sustained relationships, and an institution with a long enough memory to hold what it learns.
What this work requires is a permanent, independent home whose only mandate is to pursue it — and whose definition of success is not measured in grant cycles, but in centuries. That is the gap the RAD Lab occupies.
We know we are early. We know the letters we discover in our lifetimes will be incomplete, contested, revised by those who come after us. That is how foundational work goes.
But we also know that someone has to continue. If we stop at A-Z, the rest of the body — beyond vocal cords and windpipes — will remain lost in our tools. We will continue hunching over our phones and keyboards. We will tread with nervy caution when near an autonomous vehicle. We will cringe when the hospital droid reaches to check our vital signs. The question of what movement means — and what it means for machines to move among us — is not going away.
Nor, for now, is the RAD Lab.