Robotic Dancers from around the globe are gathering in the urban jungle to dance their hearts out.
In a dazzling display of moves, some have come from as far as Asia and the U.S. to strut their stuff on the streets of London.
The robots will gather in Trafalgar Square this Saturday (September 19) for a series of performances – with each bot programmed to perform to music it has been given by its owner.
The event, nicknamed Robot Dance Off!, is part of the London Design Festival, which celebrates and promotes London as the design capital of the world.
The festival features hundreds of events staged by leading international designers, cultural institutions and businesses.
Robotic Dancers from around the globe are gathering in the urban jungle to dance their hearts out.
The competition will be fierce, but everyone is encouraged to get up and dance, as long as your batteries are fully charged.
We’re not talking about some boring dance competition for people, though. This one is for robots!
Robot Street Dance is a documentary film about the people who dedicate their lives to robot street dance. The filmmakers are seeking funding to complete production, editing, and distribution of the film.
Robot street dance is a worldwide phenomenon that combines elements from anime, hip hop, and robotics. It was initially popularized in Japan in the early 2000s through the 2003 film Wild Robot Battle. The film was a major success in Japan, but never achieved widespread release in other countries.
The robot street dance community has grown rapidly since then through online video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. In fact, according to a recent study by the University of Tokyo, there are more people interested in robot street dance than golf or mountain biking. Robotic Dancers from around the globe are gathering in the urban jungle to dance their hearts out.
Robotic dancers from around the globe are gathering in the urban jungle to dance their hearts out.
This is a first of its kind competition as it is a global event taking place in one of the most diverse cities in the world.
The competition is being held at the Central Plaza, Hong Kong and involves 4 teams: 2 international and 2 local.
The teams are judged on 3 different perspectives; technical, artistic and entertainment.
The winning team will take away a cash prize of $60,000 HKD with second and third place receiving $20,000 HKD and $10,000 HKD respectively.
Here are highlights of our interview with last year’s champion, Team “Psuedo-dudes”.
To The Beatbots, a robot is not a machine designed and built to conform as closely as possible to the laws of physics, but instead a machine that conforms to the rules of dance.
Robots have been dancing for over 50 years now. In fact, the first dancing robot was created in 1962 by Russian animatronics engineer, Vasily Klyukin. He called his creation Samokhodnaya Ugroza, which translates to Self-Propelled Threat in English.
Later on in the 1970s and 1980s, robots added freestyle dance moves to their routines as they were programmed with more complex algorithms. Robots were now able to move their limbs independently of each other and add in a few fancy footwork elements.
However it was not until the 1990s that robots were able to add some serious swagger to their steps. And this is largely thanks to Asimo (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility). Created by Honda, Asimo was designed specifically with bipedal movement in mind. Asimo was programmed to mimic the natural gait of a human being and has been getting down ever since.
A new generation of street dance robots is popping, locking and moonwalking their way around the world.
Robots have long been associated with industrial production and repetitive assembly tasks, but a group of roboticists are bringing them to the stage.
From a robot drummer in Germany to a dancing duck in Japan and a pair of limbo-dancing robots in the US, these machines are being programmed to perform some slick dance moves.
Developers hope that by working on more creative tasks it will advance machine learning technologies and make robots more useful in our lives.
In Germany, engineer Alexander Bahr has created a robot drummer called AutoBeat that can play along to songs by keeping time and mimicking beats.
Robotics is the study of robots. Robots are machines capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer. Robotics is related to the sciences of electronics, engineering, mechanics, and software.
The word “robot” itself comes from a work of fiction, Karel Capek’s play R.U.R., written in 1920 and first performed in 1921. This word was first used to mean a mechanical man in the play when Rossum’s Universal Robots came onto the scene. The word “robotics” was coined by Isaac Asimov in his 1941 science fiction short story Liar! In this story Asimov imagined small medical robots and their impact on society. Asimov’s use of the word has become universal in science fiction and popular usage.
Robots can be guided by an external control device or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be constructed on the lines of human form, but most robots are machines designed to perform a task with no regard to their aesthetics.
