What’s yellow, round, and can dance independently to music? Keepon (pronounced, “key-pong”) is a Carnegie Mellon robotics project turned internet sensation. CMU student Marek Michalowski and Hideki Kozima of Japan’s National Institute of Communications Technology featured the adorable Keepon robot in a music video for Spoon’s “I Turn My Camera On”, which has now been viewed more than 1.3 million times on YouTube.
The bot uses a gimbal-based system to move through about as full a range of motions as two spheres are capable of, and is able to react to both music and visual stimulation. According to the designers, “Keepon is designed to perform emotional and attention exchange with human interactants (especially children) in the simplest and most comprehensive way.”
Although the robot is still in the lab, this little guy already has fans across the globe. Looks like we’re all really children at heart.
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