This Robot Dances Gangnam Style Better Than You
Charli, already a renowned soccer player, is now a slick dancer
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Meet Charli. Charli is a robot, designed and built by the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) at Virginia Tech. Charli is a better dancer than you–at least when it comes to Korean pop star Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” As It’s Okay to be Smart blogger Joe Hanson put it: “I was all ‘there’s no way it can gallop’ and then it kind of gallops.”
Charli is technically Charli-2, short for Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning Intelligence. This five-foot tall robot has 25 degrees of freedom and a top walking speed of just under one mile per hour. In a YouTube comment, the RoMeLa team say that “his was done for fun during our free time (so no tax dollars spent). Enjoy!”
According to Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman, the U.S. Navy is interested in using a variant of Charli as a robotic deckhand and shipboard firefighter. That is, if his pro soccer career doesn’t take off first.
More from Smithsonian.com:
Don’t Trust Robots? The Pentagon Doesn’t Either
In Long History of Creepy Robot Babies, this One Takes the Cake
Robot Apocalypse Inches Closer as Machines Learn To Install Solar Panels
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