Dance is an art and when technology meets this kind of art, it is a novel attempt in itself. Many researchers have attempted to automate several aspects of dance, right from dance notation to choreography; from dance capturing to dance generation. We define and illustrate the concept of ‘Dance Automation’ in this paper. Furthermore, we have encountered several applications of dance automation like e-learning, heritage preservation, medical therapy, etc. Despite decades of continuous attempts by many researchers in various styles of dance all round the world, we found a review paper that portrays the research status in this area of ‘dance and computers’ dating to 1990 (Leonardo 1990 Computers and dance: A bibliography, pp. 87–90). Hence, we decided to compose a comprehensive review article that showcases several aspects of dance automation and document contributions of researchers in marrying creativity with logic. This paper is an attempt to review research work reported in the literature, categorize and group significant research work completed in a span of 1967–2020 in the field of automating dance. We have explicitly identified six major categories corresponding to the use of computers in dance automation, namely, dance representation, dance capturing, dance semantics, dance generation, dance processing approaches and applications of dance automation systems. We classified several research papers under these categories according to their research approach and functionality. With the help of proposed categories and subcategories, one can easily determine the state of research and the new avenues left for exploration in the field of dance automation.

舞蹈是一门艺术，当科技遇到这种艺术，本身就是一种新的尝试。许多研究人员试图自动化舞蹈的几个方面，从舞蹈符号到编舞；从舞蹈捕捉到舞蹈生成。我们在本文中定义并说明了“舞蹈自动化”的概念。此外，我们还遇到了一些舞蹈自动化的应用，如电子学习、遗产保护、医学治疗等。 尽管世界各地许多研究人员对各种舞蹈风格进行了数十年的不断尝试，但我们发现了一篇描述该研究的综述论文可追溯到 1990 年的“舞蹈和计算机”领域的地位（Leonardo 1990 Computers and dance: A bibliography，第 87-90 页）。因此，我们决定撰写一篇全面的评论文章，展示舞蹈自动化的几个方面，并记录研究人员在将创造力与逻辑结合方面的贡献。本文试图回顾文献中报道的研究工作，对 1967-2020 年间在自动化舞蹈领域完成的重要研究工作进行分类和分组。我们明确确定了与计算机在舞蹈自动化中的使用相对应的六大类别，即舞蹈表现、舞蹈捕捉、舞蹈语义、舞蹈生成、舞蹈处理方法和舞蹈自动化系统的应用。我们根据研究方法和功能将几篇研究论文归入这些类别。在提议的类别和子类别的帮助下，