Dancing Robots Help Preserve Japanese Culture

Neil Halelamien writes "As reported on robots.net and other sources, researchers at Tokyo have used the HRP-2 Promet humanoid robot to help preserve moves from ancient Japanese dance for future generations. The researchers used motion capture to record the movements of a dancing master, then encoded and replayed them on the robot. The HRP-2 Promet robots are themselves quite interesting, capable of standing up after lying down and non-autonomously operating a backhoe. The external appearance was created by a designer known for his work on several anime series."

Comments

Sick...

[teutonic_leech]

Okay, IDNRTFA - but the sheer idea of something like this is a testimony of where we are heading on this planet. A dance is a cultural heritage that should be preserved by human beings, not by robots, otherwise it loses its meaning. If nothing else - the thought of 'dancing robots' really freaks me out - and I'm definitely not a Luddite - just something sick about this...

Re:Sick...

[servognome]

To record the moves to be replayed verbatim over and over is insulting to say the least, and verging on the point of disgusting. It certainly isn't right.
Do you think it's wrong that we record music? I mean we record the sounds and play them over and over, never changing. Saying "robots should never dance" is pretty short-sighted. It could be used for a number of historical purposes. Throw the 'bot in a box for 200 years, and compare his moves to what is being done at the time. Society collapses, and styles are lost, the robot could be an important point of study and revive a dead style.
From a tech standpoint the robots could also be used to improve AI, so that robots can mimic (or even develop depending on your philosophical view), minor variances based on "feelings" when performing something artistic.

Re:Sick...

[servognome]

Music is auditory, and recording it is very different to emulating it.
I don't think music is different from art or music. It is created from human expression just the same, only the medium is different. When you talk about emulation that is what your player does, it emulates the music the musician created. An MP3 not an exact replica (encoding loses data), and moreover, it's recorded in a special room and manipulated by all sorts of machines to sound good (see Ashlee Simpson).
The robot is a recording device, same as a camera, but it functions in 3-dimensions, you can walk around it, you can see things that may be hidden from a camera. Perhaps your objection is that the robot is limited such that it may not have the resolution to capture everything important. Maybe facial expressions are lost, or its incapable to capture an exact postion. I would agree with that. But, as a tool I think a robot is valuable and over time improvements could make it so that what it loses could be comparable to the differences between a live concert performance and a CD.

Re:Sick...

[willpall]

Your post was well thought out until In short, I call typical American xenophobia.

I read and reread the parent post and could not find a xenophobic statement up there. Just an understandable feeling of uneasiness about a human artform being preserved by robots. Although I do agree with you that it's better than having that artform completely lost, I still fail to see where xenophobia enters the picture. I call typical American-bashing :-)