Seven Synchronized ‘Spot’ Robots Perform a Highly Choreographed Dance to ‘IONIQ (I’m On It)’ by BTS

In celebration of Boston Dynamics (previously) becoming a part of Hyundai Motor Group, a group of seven synchronized Spot robots performed a highly choreographed dance to the BTS song for Hyundai entitled “IONIQ (I’m On It)”.

The steps are so perfectly timed, and the motions so smooth and harmonious, that you might think the robots are actually listening and responding to the music. But they’re not; they’re listening to their synchronized inner clocks. For all their sophisticated sensors, the robots don’t even know that music is playing. And their ability to move through space without stepping on one another’s toes is the result of painstaking positioning and programming, rather than Spot’s obstacle avoidance feature.

The routine was professionally choreographed by Monica Thomas and programmed into specialized software that dictated the movement of the robots.

For the Spot’s On It video, Thomas was interested in the idea of the Spots acting as both individual dancers, and as part of a unified whole. In the early stages, she moved stones around on a table to represent the “marching band” style synchronization of the routine and show engineers what she wanted. …Finally, the Spot team created the dance moves in Choreographer, a Spot software module created by Boston Dynamics specifically for Spot dance routines.