We all like a dancing robot, but there is a huge difference between a human pre-computed performance and getting the robot to work out a routine, or even to mimic a human. Disney can now get a robot to dance just by showing it what a human can do.

We have seen so many demos of robots dancing that we tend to foget that all is usually not as it seems. To get a robot to stand on two legs and walk upright is surprisingly difficult and to get a robot to move in any complex way without falling over needs a lot of computation. You cannot, for example, take a motion capture from a human dancing and just transfer the moves to the robot's limbs. You need, not just positions, but the forces that have to be applied to keep the whole motion going. Out of the box, robots just don't do that - without a lot of human help robots just don't dance.

What Disney and ETH Zurich have been working on is taking a simple motion capture and transferring it to a set of instructions to the motors to make the robot perform the same actions. It's not completely autonomous dancing, but you could train a network to generate the motion capture data without any need for it to understand physics or the structure of the robot.

You don't need to understand how the system works to appreciate what it can be used for. Take a look at the video to see how good the technique is. Look out for the real robot dancing at the end of the video, keeping in mind the fact that nobody actually programmed those moves - the robot is simply following the specification in the top corner:

And, yes, it falls over - but wouldn't you?

You can find the details of how it is done in Disney's research paper, but essentially a neural network learned the structure of the movement and then fed this into a neural network, trained using reinforcment learning to make the robot follow the motion as accurately as possible. The trained model doesn't simply remember the solutions for the movements it has been trained on, it generalizes so that it can generate robot movements for dances it didn't see in the training.

Of course, if you can make a robot dance you can make it do many other things.

More Information

VMP: Versatile Motion Priors for Robustly Tracking Motion on Physical Characters

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