Street dancer teams up with robot dancers

MORE TIME NEEDED: Many humanoid robotics companies are struggling to find commercially viable uses for their humanoids beyond entertainment

Chinese street dancer Wu Yufei (吳宇飛) has spent most of his 13-year career performing solo, but this year, he found some new partners — a crew of robots with sleek moves.

The 27-year-old Sichuan native, together with his fellow robot performers, has made it to the final of America’s Got Talent (AGT), a stage he had been hoping to reach for years.

A longstanding science-fiction fan, Wu said in Pasadena, California, that dancing with robots in the group Homies gave him a “very magical feeling.”

Chinese street dancer Wu Yufei performs alongside Unitree Robotics humanoid robots during a demonstration in Pasadena, California, on Thursday last week, ahead of their performance in the season 21 finals of America’s Got Talent.

Photo: AFP

After months of training with them, his robot dancers now feel like more than just “cold, lifeless machines,” he said.

“It almost feels as if there’s a kind of team spirit there,” Wu said, as he and the dance crew of humanoids — made by Chinese robotics group Unitree — prepared for the AGT final this week.

Robot dancing has become a huge craze in China after Unitree robots performed in a breakout performance at China’s annual Spring Festival gala performance, the country’s most-watched television extravaganza.

Businesses and event planners across the country have since rushed to hire robots to perform and attract visitors.

Training robots to dance involves capturing intricate human movements, running computer simulations, and then transferring results to the robots, industry insiders said.

For Fang Zhenghua (方正華), the art director behind Wu and Unitree’s AGT performances, training a robot to dance resembles “creating a soul.”

“The impact of AI [artificial intelligence] on dance performances, or the impact of robots on dancing — I was quite against it all at the beginning,” he said.

However, over time, working with the skilled engineers — who he describes as the “mothers” of the robots — changed his perspective.

Training robots requires input from human dancers and relies heavily on engineers to troubleshoot problems, particularly in real-time during performances.

“It takes a lot of fine-tuning,” said Liu Zhiquan (劉志全), commercialization lead at robotics motion-capture firm BridgeDP.

A 30-second dance routine could take days, sometimes weeks, to perfect, and performers need to be willing to compromise, he said.

“If the dancers are not tech-savvy, there will be a lot of retakes,” he said.

Wegers Wei (魏唯), from Shanghai-based dance studio Limit Crew, said that when he designs routines for robots, he avoids movements that he knows would be difficult for them.

“If we find that some routines don’t look good for robots or if they look like the robots are making mistakes, we would change them,” said Wei, whose robots won first and second places for street dance at this year’s World Humanoid Robot Games.

Robots are good at rotating moves, or what street dancers call power moves, Wei said, as it is “just a matter of adjusting the motor power and the torque of the arms.”

However, routines that require body flexibility are extremely difficult for robots, he said.

Another blind spot is musicality.

Robot dancing is mostly scripted playback. Unlike humans, the machines cannot improvise or “make on-the-spot adjustments” if the music changes suddenly, Wu added.

While the general public in China mostly sees robot dancing as entertainment, industry insiders see it as a chance to show off robotic designs, capabilities and reliability.

“That’s why everyone is keen to perform these kinds of high-skill dances,” said Guo Renjie (郭人傑), founder and CEO of robotics engineering company Zeroth.

A recent Morgan Stanley report forecast that China’s humanoid robotics market could reach US$2 billion in value this year.

Accounting for more than 97 percent of humanoid robot shipments in the first half of this year globally, the Chinese industry also faces increasing scrutiny from investors and policymakers.

Many companies are struggling to find commercially viable uses for their humanoids beyond entertainment.

Executives at humanoid robotics companies have publicly acknowledged that the industry is still years away from its own “ChatGPT moment” — the point at which robots become useful to ordinary people.

“I think everyone should give this industry time to reach its full potential,” Guo said.

Unitree made a blistering debut on the Shanghai stock market last month, surging 629 percent through the first day’s trading.

Its market capitalization has since fallen by about half from its peak.

At the AGT filming studio in Pasadena, Wu pointed to another robot benefit — how quickly his robot crew could learn routines.

“Their knowledge can be replicated extremely quickly,” he said. “Not only does a single robot learn quickly, but they can all learn the same things at the same time, which is quite terrifying.”