Boston Dynamics isn’t done teaching their bizarrely human- and animal-like robots new tricks. Their latest? Shakin’ mechanical booty.
To show off the new capabilities of their robots today, the company dropped this sleek dance number set to “Do You Love Me?” from The Contours, which is not just “more rhythm than me.” That’s a low bar. The fluidity of the movement, which seems much more normal than it did only a few years ago, is what’s remarkable here.
Are they trying to get all of us to let our guard down?
Making endearingly adorable dance numbers is certainly how to sneak ever more competent robots past all of us before one day, with hockey sticks, they drive us over.
The action appears so slick in this dance number that the staff of NerdsAreNerds questioned at length whether at least part of this was made up CG. In order to resolve the argument, we reached out to Boston Dynamics (and will update this if we hear back), but this miniature Botsby Berkeley development is right in line with similar videos they have recently posted, but with much smoother motions.
We’ve previously seen Spot the dog-like robot making identical movements to the “Uptown Funk,” by Bruno Mars, their most anthropoid Atlas robot, hop, backflip and roll over obstacles like a ninja, and its wheeled Handle robot twirl about quickly enough to notice figure skaters.
In these dance moves, the range of motion on show is especially remarkable considering where the tech of Boston Dynamics was only five years before, where its Spot-style robot was not a sleek thin yellow-cased pupper, but rather a bigger bot with jerkier movements. In 2016, with all the grace of your asthmatic uncle, Atlas was already awkwardly lifting boxes and trying to hold its balance walking in the snow. After it was knocked flat, standing back up took a bit, too.
That being said, no amount of posterior-counterweight-shaking can hide the fact that Spot grew a creepy snake-like head on its long neck for this video. It looks like a functional grabber-claw for the four-legged bot, but I’m still going to have nightmares all week about a dystopian future full of robot snake-dogs. Thanks again, Boston Dynamics!