Motion Capture Helps Robots Wiggle Hips

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 2 of November , 2009 at 1:45 am

Some robots are, granted, awesome dancers, but most are just too robot-y. If you think about it, it’s a lot like early computer animation… It’s hard to convincingly mimic all of the subtle movements that humans use when dancing (or doing pretty much anything else). This is exactly why the motion capture suit was invented, and it’s a wonder that nobody’s used them to program a robot before. Or maybe they have, but this is the first video I’ve seen of it in action. And it really does seem to make a difference to the robots’ moves… I’d venture to call them significantly more lifelike.

The research team from South Korea that’s developing this technique is focusing specifically on hip movements, because as you know, your hips are what keep the rest of your body from falling over when you’re bustin’ those crazy dance moves, yo. It still appears to be a fairly restrained system, but if it does for robots what motion capture did for CGI, Dancing With The Stars could get a lot more interesting.

That’s a show, right? I wouldn’t know, ’cause I of course wouldn’t watch anything of the sort.

Unless it had robots in it.

[ IROS Paper ] VIA [ Robots Dreams ]

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Category: Musical, Research

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