MINI humanoid robots will tomorrow preview a choreographed dance routine that promises to be one of the hits of this year’s Edinburgh International Science Festival.
The six mini-robots will recreate the movements of human dancers in the show, which is set to music. The event will not only showcase their agility and range of movement, but also their gracefulness.
Also on display will be a softball-pitching robot arm and a two-legged walking device. These machines are designed to mimic how humans use their muscles to store and use energy to optimise their power and efficiency.
Staff at the University of Edinburgh have created dancing robots
The two-legged robot is the first in the world to have sprung joints that can simultaneously adjust their stiffness and damping over variable surfaces.
This is intended to enable smooth movement over uneven terrain for prosthetic limbs or robots operating in dangerous environments, such as earthquake zones, fires, or deep-sea operations.
Professor Sethu Vijayakumar, of University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, said: “We are developing robots that offer the best of both worlds – the reliability of automation combined with flexible and sophisticated decision-making of humans. We’re meeting the huge challenges involved in taking robotics to the next level by exploiting advances in data driven machine learning.
“The result is more precise, powerful, safer robots that draw inspiration from the way humans think and move.”
