Now, humanoid robots that can perform hip-hop!

WELLINGTON - Who says only Michael Jackson could do the perfect moonwalk? If scientists in Sydney are to be believed, then even robots may soon burn the dance floor.

Mary-Anne Williams and her colleagues at the University of Technology are building and programming a group of humanoid robots to dance - the agile automatons already have mastered hip-hop.

“It’s all about having precise control over a robot’s body. We need to be able to do that better if we want to have robots in our home. We don’t want them bumping into things,” Stuff.co.nz quoted Williams as saying.

Making robots dance is no cakewalk though, because humans are the only animals that dance to music, said Williams.

Computer scientist Benjamin Johnston developed a programming language to make it easier to direct the robots’ movements.

He spent hours watching small sections of the choreographed dance video, then placed the robots in the appropriate dance position, storing the data in their memory. Each musical beat was then matched to a dance move.

Finally, the robots’ clocks were synchronised so they dance in unison.

“I would say it takes about two hours [to program] every five seconds of dance,” he said. (ANI)