- “I think when people see the new things that robots can do, it excites them,” Boston Dynamics founder and chairperson Marc Raibert told reporters.
The man behind the world’s most advanced dynamic robots wanted to make a dancing robot to dance to a beat with a mix of fluid, explosive, and expressive motions that are almost human. And the result?
A video that ran less than three minutes. It took about a year and a half of choreography, simulation, programming, and upgrades all capped off with two days of filming.
The clip showed robots dancing to the 1962 hit “Do You Love Me?” by The Contours. It was an instant hit on social media and attracted more than 23 million views in the first week.
Featured are two Boston Dynamics’ humanoid Atlas research robots dancing the twist, along with other classic dance moves like the mashed potato. The robots were joined by Spot, a doglike robot and Handle, a wheeled robot designed to lift and move boxes into warehouses or trucks.
According to Marc Raibert, Boston Dynamics founder and chairperson, what the robot maker learned was far more valuable. “It turned out that we needed to upgrade the robot in the middle of development in order for it to be strong enough and to have enough energy to do the whole performance without stopping. So that was a real benefit to the design,” Raibert says.
To teach a dancing robot is a difficult challenge that also pushed Boston Dynamics engineers to develop better motion-programming tools that allow robots to reconcile balance, bouncing and doing a performance at the same time.
“So we went from having very crude tools for doing that to having very effective rapid-generation tools so that by the time we were done, we could generate new dance steps very quickly and integrate them into the performance,” Raibert says.
Viewers thought the dance was so good, they said they couldn’t believe their eyes. While some thought that the moves and technology powering them were awesome, others were freaked out by some of their expressive routines.
Others said they thought the robots dancing was due to computer-generated imagery, or CGI. Raibert says it’s not so.
“We didn’t want a robot doing robotlike dancing. We wanted it to do human dancing and, you know, when a human dances, the music has a beat and their whole body moves to it — their hands, their body, their head,” he says. “And we tried to get all of those things involved and coordinated so that it, you know, it was … it looked like the robot was having fun and really moved with the music. And I think that had a lot to do with the result of the production.”
“You know, our job is to try and stretch the boundaries of what robots can do, both in terms of the outer research boundary, but also in terms of practical applications. And I think when people see the new things that robots can do, it excites them,” he says.
“We hoped … that people would enjoy it and they seem to. We’ve gotten calls from all around the world,” Raibert says. “We got a call from one of the sound engineers who had recorded the original Contours performance back in the ’60s. And he said that his whole crew of Motown friends had been passing it around and been excited by it.”