Ladies and gentlemen, I’m officially announcing a new titleholder of ‘Happiest Robot in the World‘ (formerly held by Plen)! Now here’s a dancing can of Coke done right, to say the least! Keepon is a little, yellow-but-snowman-like robot that dances to music and reacts to sights and sounds. The idea might sound stale, but I gurantee Keepon will make you smile. Seriously, if he doesn’t make you smile I’m tempted to think you’re dead inside!

Developed by Hideki Kozima at the NICT research center, Keepon is a jiggling little fella that totally reminds me of the cute little characters often seen in movies by Hayao Myazaki (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, etc.). The second video below especially.

Keepon Dancing!

As reported by Loving the Machine, Keepon’s dancing style isn’t based on mere prescripted sequence of actions, but uses sensor input and random perturbations of dancing parameters to produce the overall behavior:

For Keepon, “tempo” is an abstract property that can be perceived in lots of different modalities: sound, vision, accelerometer movement…when he perceives periodic events, he figures out the tempo and synchronizes to that. But his dancing “style” is an emergent property of randomly changing dance “parameters” rather than a scripted set of movements.
(-Marek Michalowski at LTM)

This is what I’ve been hoping game developers start paying more attention to when it comes to animating NPCs, to avoid the annoying ‘looping’ of movements that so inelegantly destroy realism.

In addition to his mad dancing skills, Keepon has cameras in its eyes, and a microphone in its nose to react to environmental events.

Keepon Reacting to its environment

Links & References

• Beatbots on Keepon
• Loving the Machine article
• Hideki Kozima, creator of Keepon
• Former Happiest Robot in the World, Plen