Unitree’s bipedal robot shows off slick moves alongside human dancers

Here at New Atlas, we like to keep tabs on developments in the world of robotics – just so we’re aware of how soon Terminator-style machines will assemble and march against the human race. As it turns out, they’re now well past marching without falling over, and are now joining human dancers in complex choreographed performances.

Last week, Chinese robotics company Unitree released a video showing 16 of its H1 humanoid robots busting moves alongside human dancers at a Spring Festival (or Chinese New Year) Gala event. They not only danced in sync with the beat and the human troupe, but each of them also flawlessly pulled off an incredibly challenging feat: spinning a handkerchief, throwing it, and catching it in motion.

This sleight of hand is a highlight of the Chinese folk dance, Yangge, and is said to require a ton of practice. And while the H1 performance isn’t the first time we’ve seen a bipedal robot dance, it’s probably the most impressive example yet.

Unitree’s clip above includes footage of the bots in a rehearsal space and on a stage. In the video from Chinese news agency CCTV below, you can see the H1s perform live in front of an audience at the ‘Chunwan’ Spring Festival gala in Beijing.

According to the company, this was the world’s “first large-scale, fully AI-driven and fully automated cluster humanoid robot performance in history.”

Fun fact: this dance was televised as part of the country’s annual New Year extravaganza, which is recognized by the Guinness World Records as the world’s most-watched annual TV program. It attracted nearly half a billion views back in 2012, and the number is said to have doubled as of today.

Speaking with Unitree, CNET noted the dance routine was a preset performance using data from real dancers. Whole-body AI motion control enabled the H1s to dance in sync with each other, and LiDAR scans of the environment allowed the robots to make small adjustments in reaction to unscripted events around them.

This is a major step up from Boston Dynamics’ 2020 dance demo, which featured a number of its two-legged, four-legged and wheeled robots dancing to The Contours’ Do You Love Me together. While they did a great job pulling off a choreographed sequence around four years ago, Unitree’s bots depicted more natural movements, the ability to share stage space with human dancers in motion, and pulled off that signature kerchief move.

That’s a big achievement for Unitree, which has been working on enhancing its quadruped and bipedal robots’ movements over the past few years. The company already makes robot dogs that can walk, run, and avoid obstacles while following you.

It also sells the G1, a US$16,000 4.26-ft (130-cm)-tall humanoid robot with three-finger dexterous hands. The G1 was recently shown running on rocky terrain, down a set of stairs, and even sideways on a slope.

The dancing H1, meanwhile, is taller at 5.74 ft (175 cm), pricier at $90,000, and can land a backflip without hydraulics. This model is equipped with 3D LiDAR sensors and a depth camera for 360-degree environment scanning. Its agility on the dance floor can likely be credited to a motion capture dataset for humanoid robots that Unitree recently open sourced; an accompanying video for the dataset shows off a number of complex moves.

It’s hard to say if robots will take over the world of dance in the future. However, Unitree expects to see them engaged in more commercial applications within three to five years, as their perception, comprehension and task-execution capabilities improve.

There’s a lot at stake for the company as it develops its robotics tech. According to the Chinese research institute CCID’s Consulting Advanced Manufacturing Research Center, there are some 80,000 robotics companies in that country alone. They’ll all be competing to serve the upcoming demand for these machines.

Unitree

The South China Morning Post noted that within China itself, humanoid robots are expected to account for $2.7 billion in sales by 2026. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs forecasted that the global demand for humanoid robots will hit $38 billion by 2035.

If you’re keen on following how far robots have come, check out some of our recent coverage. In the last few months, we’ve seen a humanoid robot purpose-built for working in warehouses, a wheeled quadruped tackle difficult terrain like it was nothing, and pulling off parkour stunts on snow-covered hills, and jellyfish- and worm-like machines powered by ‘robot blood.’

Source: Unitree Robotics