A humanoid robot waltzes with help from an AI trained on human motion capture recordings
Xuxin Cheng and Mazeyu Ji
An AI that helps humanoid robots mirror a person’s movement could allow robots to walk, dance and fight in more convincingly human ways.
The most agile and fluid robotic movements, such as Boston Dynamics’s impressive demonstrations of robot acrobatics, are typically narrow, pre-programmed sequences. Teaching robots to perform a wider repertoire of convincingly human movements is still difficult.
To overcome this hurdle, Xuanbin Peng at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues have developed an artificial intelligence system called ExBody2, which lets robots copy and smoothly perform many different human movements in more lifelike ways.
Peng and his team first created a database of actions that a humanoid robot might be capable of performing, from simple movements like standing or walking to more complex manoeuvres, such as tricky dance moves. The database included motion capture recordings of …