Boston Dynamics’ Atlas and Spot robots can do many things: running, gym routines, parkour, backflips, open doors to let an army of your friends in, wash dishes and (badly) get real jobs. But the company’s latest video adds another impressive trick to the repertoire of our future robotic overlords: detonating sickly dance moves.
The video shows the entire line of Boston Dynamics robots – the humanoid Atlas, the dog-shaped Spot and the box juggling Handle – all together in a vibrant, coordinated dance routine to the sound of Contours’ “Do You Love Me” .
It is not the first time that Boston Dynamics has shown the dance skills of its robots: the company showed a video of its Spot robot doing Running Man to “Uptown Funk” in 2018. but the new video takes things to another level, with the robot Atlas tearing him up on the dance floor: running smoothly, jumping, dragging his feet and turning in different movements.
Things get even more incredible as more robots leave, jumping around in the kind of coordinated dance routine that shames my own human dance, admittedly horrible. In comparison to the sudden movements of Atlas’ 2016 iteration, the new model almost looks like a CGI creation.
Boston Dynamics was recently bought by Hyundai, which bought SoftBank’s robotics firm in a $ 1.1 billion deal. The company was originally founded in 1992 as a spin-off by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where it became known for its dog-like quadruped robots (most notably, the DARPA-funded BigDog, a precursor to the company’s first commercial robot, Spot. ) It was purchased by Alphabet’s X division in 2013 and then by Softbank in 2017.
Although the Atlas and Handle robots featured here are still just research prototypes, Boston Dynamics recently started selling the Spot model to any company for a sizable $ 74,500. But can you really put a price on creating your own personal legion of dancing robot minions?