Unitree’s 12-plus Humanoids Reignite Debate Over Whether Robots Can Truly Dance

2 articles · Updated · The Atlantic · Jun 11

A CCTV Spring Festival clip of more than a dozen Unitree humanoids backflipping, kicking and wielding swords prompted a fresh look at how far robot movement has advanced—and whether that counts as dance.
Researchers say such routines rely on motion-capture data, tele-operation and online video training aimed at “embodied intelligence,” but smooth humanlike motion remains far harder to encode than text or music.
Choreobotics scholars are trying to break movement into basic “movemes,” a kind of periodic table for motion, yet they say notation is still primitive because the human body has so many degrees of freedom.
That gap, the essay argues, is why a polished preprogrammed performance differs from dancing itself: human movement carries metaphor, memory, emotion and lived bodily experience that robots do not possess.