Boston Dynamics' robot Spot has got some smooth moves! Watch as the company challenged K-pop sensation BTS to a dance-off with seven Spot robots dancing to the band's 2020 hit song IONIQ: I'm On It.
In a behind-the-scenes blog post, Boston Dynamics roboticists explained how they created the dance:
Monica Thomas, a professional choreographer and former dancer, took the lead on choreography for “Spot’s On It”, as she did for Boston Dynamics’ previous dance videos. Outlining a dance routine for robots, she notes, presents a whole separate set of challenges from traditional choreography. For one thing, she’s in constant communication with Boston Dynamics engineers to explore which steps the robots are physically able to do. And, of course, Spot has twice as many legs as a human dancer. “When I try to replay the choreography on my own body, my knees bend the wrong way, even if I put myself on all fours,” Thomas says. “I have less knowledge about what things even could look like, and so I have a lot more flexibility about what it does look like.”
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Thomas handed off dance steps to Jakob Welner, a robotic movement consultant based in Denmark, who animated them in Autodesk Maya. “You can do anything you want in the software, artistically,” Welner says. “But as soon as you want it to work on a robot, you need to comply with physics, and you need to comply with the mechanics and dynamics of the robot.”
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View the full video clip below: