Dance Robot: From Automata to ABB's Stage Arms

A dance robot is a machine that moves to music on cue, and in September 2026 one act with Unitree humanoids reached the final of America's Got Talent. This post follows the idea from eighteenth century clockwork through Honda and Boston Dynamics to the humanoids now on television. It also looks at the industrial arms that have already shared a stage with dancers, several of them from ABB, and asks what a home robot would need to dance without a team of engineers standing by. If you build robots, choreograph, or just wonder when one will dance in your living room, read on.

A Boston Dynamics Spot robot dog on display in Milan, 2022. Photo: Saggittarius A / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How machines learned to keep time

The first machines that performed for an audience ran on clockwork. In the late 1730s Jacques de Vaucanson showed a flute player and a tambourine player in Paris, figures that made real music by moving their fingers and lips. They did not dance, but they showed that a mechanism could hold musical time. Later automata added gestures and bows, and audiences learned to read a machine as a performer. People still watch a box of gears and see character in it, and every dance robot since has relied on that habit.

Vaucanson's flute player, duck and tambourine player in an old engraving. Photo: Jacques de Vaucanson via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Dance reached the stage first in costume. Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet, first staged in Stuttgart in 1922, put dancers inside stiff geometric shapes that forced doll-like movement. Nobody pretended the performers were machines, yet the piece asked what dance looks like when the body moves like one. Reconstructions of the costumes were later shown at Bauhaus exhibitions, including one in Stuttgart in 1968. Choreographers kept returning to that question as electronics arrived, and some began inviting real machines onto the stage.

A reconstruction of Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet costumes, shown in Stuttgart in 1968. Photo: Peter H. Feist / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Walking humanoids made the idea physical. Honda introduced ASIMO in 2000, and its public demonstrations turned a bipedal robot into a stage act. In late December 2020 Boston Dynamics released a video in which its Atlas humanoid, its Spot robot dog and a wheeled box handler called Handle danced to a pop song from the early sixties. It showed that machines built for balancing and lifting could also be choreographed. Dance had become a way for robot makers to show off their control systems, which is a theme that comes back below.

A close-up of the hand of Honda's ASIMO at the Honda Collection Hall. Photo: Syced / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Robot dancers go on television

The latest milestone came this autumn. Wu Yufei, a 27-year-old street dancer from Sichuan, performed with a crew of Unitree humanoids as the act Homies, and they reached the final of America's Got Talent, which aired on 22 September 2026. Wu told AFP that rehearsing with them gave him a feeling of team spirit. Robot dancing took off in China after Unitree robots performed at the Spring Festival gala, and event planners have been hiring them since. The Times and Tech Xplore both covered the act on the day of the final.

Unitree humanoid robots and a robot dog on display at the Japan Mobility Show 2025. Photo: RuinDig/Yuki Uchida / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The work behind such an act is slower than it looks. Industry insiders told AFP that training starts by capturing a human dancer, then runs the movement through simulation before it goes to the robot. A 30-second routine can take days or weeks to perfect. Choreographers avoid moves that robots handle badly, such as anything needing body flexibility, and favor spins, which depend mostly on motor power and arm torque. Robot dancing is still mostly scripted playback, so a sudden change in the music gets no reaction. Industrial arms had already learned a different style, as Huang Yi showed with a KUKA arm in 2013.

Dancer Huang Yi with a KUKA industrial robot arm at Prix Ars Electronica 2013. Photo: Manfred Werner - Tsui / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB has built up its own stage record. In September 2018 the Swedish choreographer Fredrik Rydman danced a duet with an IRB 6620, a 900 kg robot normally used for spot welding and assembly, at Stockholm's Kulturhuset Stadsteatern. In Helsinki in 2012, Thomas Freundlich staged Human Interface with two ABB arms and two dancers, programming the robots himself in RobotStudio. An IRB 2400 appeared on America's Got Talent with the group Freelusion, and in 2017 a YuMi conducted Andrea Bocelli and the Lucca Philharmonic in Pisa. An ABB engineer on the Rydman show said the hard part was linking the robot's motion to the music.

Choreographer Fredrik Rydman dancing with an ABB IRB 6620 at Stockholm's Kulturhuset Stadsteatern. Photo: ABB

What it takes to put a dance robot in the house

Choreography for a heavy arm is built the way a factory cell is built, which is where ABB's tools come in. A dance can be laid out and checked in RobotStudio before anyone stands near the machine, and several arms can be synchronized with MultiMove. ABB has not announced a humanoid dancer, so any ABB robot joining a Unitree style act would be a possibility only. A fixed arm in a theatre or theme park, carrying a screen, a light or a performer, looks like the easier fit.

An engineer programs a robot cell in ABB RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

Safety is the first open problem. The IRB 6620 weighs far more than a person, so anyone sharing a stage with it needs speed limits and defined zones. Cobots such as YuMi and GoFa stop when they sense contact, which suits close work, although they cannot lift a dancer. For homes the bar is higher still. A small dancing robot sturdy enough for a living room is much easier to build than a full-size humanoid, so the first dancers in houses are likely to be small. Several of the ABB robot use cases already put robots beside people at work.

ABB's YuMi conducts the Lucca Philharmonic with Andrea Bocelli in Pisa, 2017. Photo: ABB

Skills and cost decide the rest. Today a good routine takes a choreographer, a motion capture session and an engineer on standby, and none of those come cheap. Wu Yufei pointed out that the machines cannot improvise when the music changes, so a live jam with a robot is still ahead of us. If the tools keep getting easier, school clubs and small theatres could program short routines themselves, much as students now program arms with no code software. Factories will probably stay the main customers for robot arms, while dance gives them a friendlier public face.

Huang Yi and a KUKA robot arm waiting on a dark stage at Prix Ars Electronica 2013. Photo: Manfred Werner - Tsui / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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