I’ve always thought that robotics was a cool little piece of the electronics industry, and as such when someone tells me they have many awesome robots moving and dancing in unison to French Composer Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, they immediately have my attention. This group here was developed by (not Japan, I am shocked!) a French company that recently displayed it’s dancing robot fever technology at the still going Shanghai World Expo. The performance was about 10 minutes in total and featured three different songs that varied in tempo and style.
Now before you start thinking “Wow this is cool I want one!” Hold on there Tanto. If you want your robot to move to the groove you are going to have to fork over some serious cash. 10,000 Euros each to be exact. That means that if you want you’re own horde of dance dance revolution robots you’ll need just shy of $250,000. I don’t have that kind of spare cash around, but maybe you do.
The company is named Aldebaran Robotics, and each robot weighs just under 10 pounds. They also pack some serious hardware, using an x86 AMD Geocode 500 Mhz CPU, 2GB of flash memory, speakers, the ability to process vision capabilities, Wi-Fi connectivity, and even an ethernet port so they can communicate with skynet before the machines rise or if they want to play an online Tetris match with the Tetris playing robot. They also have 25 degrees of freedom. I didn’t recognize the term, but suffice it to say it means they can move quite a bit without being limited to looking in one direction or another. These little guys will also be featured in the upcoming Robocup, where they will be facing Singapore later this week. No word on whether they are going on strike for some inane reason or if there’s drama in the robotic locker room, however.
Via: Wired
