Video Friday: Dancing Robots and Rampant Stupidity

Whether it's disco dancing, traditional Japanese music, or near total uselessness, we've got robots doing it on video

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Video Friday: Dancing Robots and Rampant Stupidity

As often happens, it's Thursday night and I've got a slew jumble heap carefully selected assortment of robot videos that have shown up this week and I figured it would be a good idea to toss smush pile carefully present them in a post for Friday that you can enjoy without having to listen to me drone on about, you know, drones. Or whatever.

In the realm of dancing robots, researchers seem to pick the weirdest tunes to show off their latest programming tricks. I could delve into why I think that might be, but out of respect for the personal lives of all of these people who have clearly not been out of the lab since the mid-1970s, I'll keep quiet and just let you enjoy HDT Robotics' HDM robot dancing to some disco:

If that thing had a pelvis, it would be going crazy.

An entirely different (and more mature) style altogether is demonstrated by Azusa Amino's Toko Toko Maru robot, which took first place in the Robo Japan 2 Dance Contest on Sunday. Robot-Dreams brings the video:

And finally, we come to the rampant stupidity, and boy is it rampant. But that's the way we want it, because in October is another Bacarobo competition, where the stupidest, most useless robot wins a huge wad of cash. It's sort of like the Antimov Competition, except with more uselessness and less flaming death. Here's a video of some highlights from last year, which you'll enjoy slightly more if you can speak Hungarian:

Bacarobo 2011 takes place October 30 in Budapest.

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