From parade appearances to his most recent star turn at Sundance, it looks like Asimo's re-invention as a song-and-dance man continues unabated. Most recently, those crazy intellectual property lawyers-$#@!-bloggers at Stamoulis & Weinblatt, LLC have hepped us to a patent app in Honda's name that describes a robot that can not only pick up a beat and dance along, but recognize the tune and sing its lyrics as well. The latter is accomplished by a wide array of techno-stuff, including a "sound collecting unit," a "voice signal generating unit" capable of both scat singing and singing singing, a "self-vocalized voice regulating unit," and more. As far as the dancing goes, the application implies that it has something to do with a "beat interval estimating unit" and a "beat time reliability calculating unit," although we like to believe that the automaton learned to dance the way grandpa did -- from Arthur Murray on West 57th Street in Manhattan.
Asimo learns to sing and dance, but has yet to learn how to love originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.


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