The trials of hula hooping by a musculo-skeletal humanoid KOJIRO nearing dancing motions using the soft spine

Many types of humanoid robots have been developed, but it is hard to find one with supple spine structure. To act in a proper manner with sophisticated, human-like motions, we believe that humanoid robots should make use of their spines effectively. To find out how to use the spine flexibly and elegantly, we focused on dancing, the art of beautiful movements. Dancing demands you to develop flexible and well coordinated movements of the torso, so we decided to pick up a movement of the sort and achieve it by the musculo-skeletal humanoid KOJIRO, in order to improve the skills needed for dancing. We took hula hooping as an ideal sample, and after generalizing the principal of hula hooping motion by an exclusive hula-hooping robot, we will describe the trials of hula hooping by KOJIRO as the first step toward dancing humanoids(Fig.l).