Darwin-OP Learns To Play Dance Dance Revolution

Dance Dance Revolution may not hold the same appeal for robots as it does for humans, but that's not gonna stop this Darwin-OP from trying

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Darwin-OP Learns To Play Dance Dance Revolution

If you're either too old or not old enough to remember the heyday of Dance Dance Revolution (aka DDR), that's totally fine. You're not missing much. It was (is?) a video game that involves "dancing" (I'm actually making air quotes over here) by standing on various combinations of floor sensors as instructed by a video screen in time to music of dubious quality but emphatic volume.

The primary appeal of DDR, as far as I've been able to tell, is watching your friends degenerate into crazy people while playing the game, and unfortunately, robots (even the sweaty ones) can't really offer this same level of entertainment (despite their mad dancing skills). I mean, if I was a robot tasked with playing DDR, I'd probably be wondering what all the fuss was about. You see an arrow, you make the movement, what's the big deal?

For this Purdue University Darwin-OP, it's not a big deal at all. A student there has decided that his summer robotics research project is going to be to teach Darwin to play DDR, which is so far looking to be an entirely possible task, with the help of a slick custom robots-only dance pad:

At the moment, Darwin relies on a balancing bar for stability and to enable faster moves, but you hardcore DDR players should be familiar with the safety bar on the arcade machines that could be used (by crafty humans) for essentially the same purpose. In the works is tuning the robot's vision system to allow it to play DDR for real, and bar-free stability may come after that. Is anyone else thinking that Robot DDR would make a great new RoboGames event? No? Just me? Oh.

Via [ Kotaku ]

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