Japanese teach robot to dance
Scientists in Japan have taught a human-sized robot to imitate the steps of a dancer.
They say the prancing dancebot could be used to record the movements of traditional dances that are being lost as their performers die off.
To demonstrate the robot's prowess, the team programmed the 1.5 metre tall machine to imitate the graceful sways and whirls of the Aizu Bandaisan, a Japanese folk routine.
To prove its accuracy, the robot can perform alongside a human dancer. And despite its "Terminator" appearance, the robot is remarkably lifelike.
Shin'ichiro Nakaoka and his colleagues at Tokyo University taught the dancebot - named HRP-2 or Promet - by using video-capture techniques to record human dance movements. According to New Scientist magazine, these were converted into a sequence of robotic limb movements and fed into Promet's processors.
"They have got it to directly copy human movements. That is very difficult because the joints of the robot are very different from the joints of a human," said Noel Sharkey, a robotics expert at Sheffield University. The advance would allow robots to perform human-like movements on factory production lines, for example[...]
Scientists in Japan have taught a human-sized robot to imitate the steps of a dancer.
They say the prancing dancebot could be used to record the movements of traditional dances that are being lost as their performers die off.
To demonstrate the robot's prowess, the team programmed the 1.5 metre tall machine to imitate the graceful sways and whirls of the Aizu Bandaisan, a Japanese folk routine.
To prove its accuracy, the robot can perform alongside a human dancer. And despite its "Terminator" appearance, the robot is remarkably lifelike.
Shin'ichiro Nakaoka and his colleagues at Tokyo University taught the dancebot - named HRP-2 or Promet - by using video-capture techniques to record human dance movements. According to New Scientist magazine, these were converted into a sequence of robotic limb movements and fed into Promet's processors.
"They have got it to directly copy human movements. That is very difficult because the joints of the robot are very different from the joints of a human," said Noel Sharkey, a robotics expert at Sheffield University. The advance would allow robots to perform human-like movements on factory production lines, for example[...]
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