Belly-Dancing Robot

Robots are taking all of our jobs, what with car assembly lines and ATMs and such. Now engineers are working on building robots that will put human belly dancers out of work! There's an actual paper entitled "A control system for a flexible spine belly-dancing humanoid" from, of all places, Japan. Here's a selection from the abstract:

Inspired by the rhythmic movements commonly exhibited in lamprey locomotion as well as belly dancing, we designed a controller for a simulated belly-dancing robot using the lamprey central pattern generator. Experimental results show that the proposed lamprey central pattern generator module could potentially generate plausible output patterns, which could be used for all the possible spine motions with minimized control parameters.

Link -via Geekosystem | Image by deviantART user ChadRocco

We shouldn't be surprised at this result, we torched the old Gods, we toppled their temples and destroyed their wisdom. Be prepared to be made obsolete by myriad inventions. If the culture does not value you for something over and above your assets, then you are a mere product to be outdone by something synthetical.

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Ahhh, Bender's lost love, Anglelyne. I like that episode.

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This article nearly made me fall off my chair is amazement - whatever next? Belly dancing is one of my hobbies, but I do it only for exercise so robots are not applicable.

I like your article and am going to give it a mention in my blog "Jewel's Belly Bancing Blog".