Marek Michalowski of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, US, and Hideki Kozima of the National Institute of Communications Technology (NICT) in Kyoto, Japan, programmed the squishy, yellow robot, called "Keepon", to pick out the beat in a piece of music and move along in time. It can also track the rhythmic motion of a person or another object and move in time to that. Inside the hollow robot's silicone body are motors, wires and a mechanical device called a gimbal that tugs it like a reversed marionette. Keepon responds by nodding, bobbing, twisting and shaking in time to audio or visual stimulation.

Inside the hollow robot’s silicone body are motors, wires and a mechanical device called a gimbal that tugs it like a reversed marionette. Keepon responds by nodding, bobbing, twisting and shaking in time to audio or visual stimulation.

Future Vision by Erwin Van Lun on this article

Robots are the next step after the media context has grown up. That’ll take at least a year or ten, but then robots will slowly begin to enter our lives. They’ll also seem more and more natural. We might not be able to imagine it, but eventually robots will replace many dancing instructors. Human teachers will only take the best to a higher level. And then in hindsight this movie will only be a sweet, cute beginning.

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