So you think you can dance? Robot version
Keepon, at rest.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science
Keepon is a small, unassuming robot. Just two rubber yellow balls – a body, and a head – Keepon can dance. And you’d never guess that his dance moves have rocketed him to robot stardom.
Earth & Sky’s spoke to Marek Michalowski, the Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University who first put Keepon to music about what Keepon does.
Keepon has been the focus of a music video and he’s performed live in concert. But his day job is in a Japanese laboratory, helping scientists to understand how children learn to socialize.
Keepon is a very simple robot, but he can make eye contact, and of course, he’s a very good dancer – he kind of bops and twists around to a beat. The children try to imitate and dance around with him.
Scientists also use Keepon in experiments. There’s a visual rhythm to human interactions, between our speech and movement. It’s a lot like a dance. The scientists program Keepon to synchronize with music or a child’s movements. Then they’ll change his behavior and try to understand why the interaction was different. So, they’re studying how people begin to socialize, and also they’re developing more advanced and human-like robots.
Keepon is also used in research with children with autism. “One of the theories about the disability that children with autism face stems from that they have problems understanding other people’s mental states, said Michalowski. “What we’re doing in those studies with children is to see how they interact with the robot as an expression as what they think about the robot’s mental states, if they understand the robot to have mental states at all.
“You can begin to see those things in the way they establish joint attention with the robot, or establishing eye contact with robot. If they perceive it as having intentions and desires of its own, then they’ll behave in a certain way with it. And then we can see that children of different ages, or stages of experience with the robot. they understand the robot in different ways.”
Sounds like Keepon has a promising future.
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This little yellow robot has a lot of rhythm and soul. He has “the beat” even without legs and arms. Give those with dance phobias hope.
Lindsay is an amazing reporter so greative and has great music taste.
This is wonderful! I wonder how he would move to classica music, especially atonal!