Dancing with the robots: Austrian hexapods
By Susannah F. Locke
This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
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Move over, HAL, there's an entire brigade of rock 'em, sock 'em robots in town. They're dexterous, graceful, and they can . . . dance?
This hot YouTube video features a bunch of hexapods (six-legged robots) getting down to the beat with choreographed bounces, splits and shimmies for the third annual hexapod robot dance contest.
Some of bots that competed also performed at halftime during robot soccer matches. I kid you not.
The dance-off was held back in the spring at Hagenberg Technical College in Austria, but has been getting a lot of buzz recently thanks to YouTube. (Video below.)
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