October 22, 2012 10:47 am
This Robot Dances Gangnam Style Better Than You
Meet Charli. Charli is a robot, designed and built by the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) at Virginia Tech. Charli is a better dancer than you–at least when it comes to Korean pop star Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” As It’s Okay to be Smart blogger Joe Hanson put it: “I was all ‘there’s no way it can gallop’ and then it kind of gallops.”
Charli is technically Charli-2, short for Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning Intelligence. This five-foot tall robot has 25 degrees of freedom and a top walking speed of just under one mile per hour. In a YouTube comment, the RoMeLa team say that “[t]his was done for fun during our free time (so no tax dollars spent). Enjoy!”
According to Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman, the U.S. Navy is interested in using a variant of Charli as a robotic deckhand and shipboard firefighter. That is, if his pro soccer career doesn’t take off first.
More from Smithsonian.com:
Don’t Trust Robots? The Pentagon Doesn’t Either
In Long History of Creepy Robot Babies, this One Takes the Cake
Robot Apocalypse Inches Closer as Machines Learn To Install Solar Panels
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That’s because Gangnam Style is a robotic dance and the song enjoyed by the soulless.
Comment by JOR — October 22, 2012 @ 11:00 am