These Adorable Robots Can Groove To BTS Songs Just As Well As The Members
Boston Dynamics, an American engineering and robotics design company, has been well known for its impressive dancing robots!
Since December 2020, the company is now fully owned by South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group, with the acquisition being finalized a few days ago. To celebrate this, Boston Dynamics decided to have seven Spot robots dance to Hyundai and BTS‘s commercial song “IONIQ: I’m On It.”
One of the robots met BTS two days ago, much to the enjoyment of the members.
The robotics team then got to work on forming the dance. The dog-like robots move in perfect unison by flexing their long arms and bouncing to the beat. In fact, it’s almost too flawless. It looks CGI!
It didn’t come easy, though, as both the engineers and choreographers worked countless hours for these 77 seconds.
There were a lot of challenges around getting the vision of our choreographer, who’s used to dealing with human dancers, into our software. Everything had to be worked out in advance and scripted precisely. Robots have the advantage over humans in that they’re very repeatable: Once you get it right, it stays right. But they have the disadvantage that you have to tell them every little detail. They don’t improvise at all.
—Eric Whitman, a roboticist on the project
However, this isn’t the robots’ first song as they did Bruno Mars‘s “Uptown Funk” in 2018 and The Contours‘ “Do You Love Me” in 2020. Dancing is a complex act that helps the engineers learn more about the robots and therefore improve technology (while being extremely fun).
Either way, the result is an amazingly entertaining performance that truly embodies the spirit of BTS.
