Humanoid robots could one day serve as prancing libraries of long-forgotten dance routines 鈥� able to reproduce them for curious audiences without a moment鈥檚 rehearsal. It鈥檚 the latest approach to preserving traditional folk dances as the people skilled in performing them gradually die off.
The idea comes from Shin鈥檌chiro Nakaoka and his colleagues at the University of Tokyo, Japan. They used video motion-capture systems to record the movement of a dancer performing a Japanese folk routine called the Aizu-Bandaisan. They turned this data into a limb-motion sequence for a humanoid robot, the , made by Japan鈥檚 Kawada Industries (Journal of Robotics Research, vol 26, p 829) (see it at ).
The robot鈥檚 biggest weakness as a dancer is keeping its balance. While HRP-2 can faithfully reproduce any upper-body movement a human can make, its footwork is far from nimble: it can perform no step more advanced than simply lifting one foot off the floor. But as Aizu-Bandaisan is primarily a dance of the upper body, these constraints don鈥檛 stop HRP-2 looking a natural on the dance floor.
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Others need more convincing. Joe Healey is an English folk dancer. 鈥淚f no one was prepared to continue and our dance troupe were to go extinct tomorrow, we鈥檇 have a problem,鈥� he says. But he thinks that videos might provide a better archive than a dancing robot. 鈥淢y impression is that there would still be a human element lacking. The robot would still look, for the want of a better word, robotic.鈥�
