A dancing robot is nothing new. A quick search on YouTube will yield videos of robots dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” “Gangnam Style,” the “Macarena,” and more. But instead of programming a robot to copy an existing dance, Amy LaViers, a Ph.D. candidate in electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is defining the various styles of human movement and creating algorithms to reproduce them on a humanoid robot.

What’s more, LaViers has produced a robotic dance performance based on her research, called “Automaton,” in which a Nao robot and professional dancers explore the notion of “automatic style.”

“We are working with such a highly articulated robot that can do so many cool things, yet there are many ways he is limited, too,” says LaViers. “I do play with that idea of: What can the robot do, and what can the people do? Where are the differences, and where are the similarities?”

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