Teaching a robot to dance turned out to be more interesting than I expected. This is how we taught AdamAI, our humanoid robot, to learn real dance moves from ordinary tutorial videos.

The idea

We built AdamAI a dance studio. You pick a dance tutorial, he watches it, and he learns to perform the moves. No motion capture suit, no special dataset. He watches a person and follows along.

Watch, mirror, remember, check

You pick a lesson and it plays in the studio. AdamAI watches the instructor and mirrors the moves live on his own body. Every routine he learns is saved so he can perform it again later and build new routines out of moves he already knows. And this is my favorite part: we record both the dancer and the robot and compare them, so the studio flags the exact moments where his move did not match, and we fix those before saving. Watch, mirror, remember, check.

Put it together and you get a robot that can watch a tutorial, follow along, remember the routine, and correct himself. Here is one of the finished routines, cut into a music video for the series.

More from the series at coburnicusmind.com.