The man who designed some of the world’s most advanced robots was on a mission: programming his creations to dance to the beat with a mix of fluid, explosive and expressive motions that are almost human.
The results? Almost a year and half of choreography, simulation, programming and upgrades that were capped by two days of filming to produce a video running less than 3 minutes.
The clip, showing robots dancing to the 1962 hit “Do You Love Me?” by The Contours, was an instant hit on social media, attracting more than 23 million views.
The challenge of teaching robots to dance pushed Boston Dynamics engineers to develop better motion-programming tools that let robots reconcile balance, bouncing and doing a performance simultaneously.
“We went from having very crude tools for doing that to having very effective rapid-generation tools, so that we could generate new dance steps very quickly and integrate them into the performance,” Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert says.
“We’ve gotten calls from all around the world. One of the sound engineers who recorded the original Contours performance in the ’60s called. He said that his crew of Motown friends had been passing it around and been excited by it.”
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