Belly-Dancing Robot

Robots are taking all of our jobs, what with car assembly lines and ATMs and such. Now engineers are working on building robots that will put human belly dancers out of work! There's an actual paper entitled "A control system for a flexible spine belly-dancing humanoid" from, of all places, Japan. Here's a selection from the abstract:

Inspired by the rhythmic movements commonly exhibited in lamprey locomotion as well as belly dancing, we designed a controller for a simulated belly-dancing robot using the lamprey central pattern generator. Experimental results show that the proposed lamprey central pattern generator module could potentially generate plausible output patterns, which could be used for all the possible spine motions with minimized control parameters.

Link -via Geekosystem | Image by deviantART user ChadRocco