As Gaga walked over to the rose-gold keyboard that was planked atop two robotic arms, the piano moved up to meet her hands as she started to play. The setup swayed as Gaga belted out Bowie’s “Suffragette City.” The mechanical arms moved in and out to the rhythm of the song, all while keeping the keyboard steady enough for the singer to control the keys.
To pull off that choreographed piano, team Gaga enlisted the help of Andy Robot, a Las Vegas-based roboticist and computer animator working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Robot (yes, that’s his name) repurposed some software he had built to program and animate two industrial bots for the performance. He followed Gaga’s vision for an instrument that had a new dimension –- it was alive. But the process that made it possible hadn’t been tried in this context before. So when the robotic team ran into a problem during rehearsals, Robot’s association with Brian Lim, head of JPL’s Planetary Landing Testbed initiative, led to a solution that involved a small piece of rubber.
via Engadget
