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Honda's Asimo + Kinect = Creepy animatronic hokey-pokey

When the end of the world comes, it will arrive on the shoulders of dancing robots. The researchers behind Asimo, the humanoid robot from Honda, have tapped into the muscle behind the Xbox Kinect system to allow users to control Asimo using nothing more than their own body movements. With self-collision safeguards and upper and lower body correlation programming in place, the adorable face of our robotic overlords is moving more like a human than ever before. What's more, Aismo can now utilize a database of text-inspired gestures as a form of communication.

Why does this matter? In the past, programmers had to individually code the movements in each of Asimo's joints in order for the robot to be able to perform a simple task. The design required a symphony of programming just for the robot to be able to walk across a stage. Now Asimo merely requires a human to move naturally in order to instruct his joints. It's a massive step forward. We're guessing it wouldn't take much to be able to record those movements for future replay, either. Hit the jump to check out the video.

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