Robotics

[ysabetwordsmith]

Watch a man dancing with a robot.

If you know robotics, you'll understand how impressive this is -- the way the robot moves and emulates a human dancer. It's basically just a stick-figure of a robot, but the articulation and motion are a lot more sophisticated than the body. It really is a robot that can dance with a human. When you think about replacing human dancers, many of the hard things have already been done here, and what's left to touch up is largely a matter of cosmetic appearances and then figuring out how to make that light enough to dance with.

Comments

[wyld_dandelyon]

Especially the standing on a human's head part! That means the programmed choreography includes instructions for the robot to keep its balance at some times no matter what little micromovements the human makes, and letting go of balance at other times to fall into his arms or be swung around by him. There's a lot of sophistication in that programming.

And I'm thinking that the leaning forward and having to have the human catch it while he was talking with the judges after the dance was programmed in too.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

The gyroscopics in that thing are brilliant. So is the programming. Some moves looked like the human was leading and the robot following, which can be done with either programming (if Human A then Robot B) or engineering (joints designed to respond to stimuli in certain ways).

It's possible that much could be preprogrammed rather than spontanteous, but some of the gyroscopics have to be live because balance relies on unpredictable context.

Any way you slice it, that dance represented years of ass-busting effort in robotics.