At the football game against Tennessee on Saturday, MU pulled off something no school has done before — using the robotic dog Spot from Boston Dynamics to march and dance in its halftime show.
Spot marched as a member of Marching Mizzou for the first and third songs, “Mr. Roboto” by Styx and “Starboy” by The Weeknd featuring Daft Punk. In the middle song, “Dancing Machine” by The Jackson 5, Spot danced with the Golden Girls, MU’s dance team. Spot’s ability to get its moves on for 45,655 fans at Faurot Field was a result of months of collaboration between the College of Engineering, Marching Mizzou and the Golden Girls. The groups wanted to challenge themselves to show what interdisciplinary programs are capable of innovating together.
Amy M. Knopps, the director of Marching Mizzou, said the performance was a “brilliant collaboration” with Information Technology faculty and students from start to finish.
“You can think about something in your mind, and you can hope that it’ll work out,” Knopps said. “When you see the plan being executed and it’s working … you’re so elated because you did it. And this is not easy to do.”
MU purchased Spot in January, and Dale Musser, an associate professor in the College of Engineering, emailed faculty in different departments over the summer for ideas incorporating Spot into their work. Knopps saw videos of Spot dancing with Truman the Tiger on Mizzou Engineering’s Instagram stories. Her idea for the halftime performance began to unfold after seeing that Spot could dance.
Kristofferson Culmer, an assistant professor in MU’s IT program, works with Spot’s programming. He said he was all for Knopps’ idea.
Culmer met with Knopps and Golden Girls coach Cayla Timberlake throughout the semester to determine how to execute the halftime performance.
For the two marching drills, “Mr. Roboto” and “Starboy,” Spot marched in formation with the band. Senior Nate Beattie, a tenor saxophone player in Marching Mizzou, controlled Spot with a remote instead of marching himself. He volunteered for the role at band camp in the summer, and went through training with Culmer to control the robot.
“[The remote] looks like a Nintendo Switch that you’re holding,” Beattie said. “It has a live camera feed and you use the joysticks to move [Spot] around.”
Beattie, who’s majoring in computer science and minoring in music, said he had been interested in working with Spot since learning about MU’s purchase in January. Controlling Spot combined his engineering and music interests.
“I was really excited to be able to work with [Spot] because it’s basically the most advanced robotics in the world — it’s super cool being able to be on the cutting edge like that,” Beattie said. “More hard sciences are going to be ending up combining with the artistic side … [using] aspects that are seemingly opposite to make something new and innovative.”
For programming Spot’s dance with the Golden Girls, Culmer worked with senior Mason Jenkins, a student in the research class that works with Spot.
Culmer and Jenkins used a different approach for Spot’s dance, which ran on its own instead of by remote control. They chose from the catalogue of dance moves in the Choreographer software program and adjusted or combined them to create Spot’s routine for “Dancing Machine.” Even with legs, it’s hard for robots to dance like humans, though.
“When people think of Spot dancing, they tend to take for granted that it doesn’t turn on a dime like a human can,” Culmer said. “If the Golden Girls are doing a twirl, [Spot] really can’t. And then when people are marching, they can turn their shoulders and go back in the other direction — not so much [with Spot].”
Culmer and Jenkins had to align the four-beat tempo of the music and the eight-beat rhythm of dance routines with Spot’s robotic movements. Culmer said it was a fun challenge and a complex learning experience.
“Spot is going to be literally in formation with 35 other human beings [in the dance], which you don’t see anywhere,” Culmer said. “This is the first time something like this is being done, so we’ve had to change our approaches because there was nothing — no scripts to go from.”
After Marching Mizzou and the Golden Girls finalized their music and choreography, Jenkins and Culmer recorded them performing so they could properly time Spot’s routine.
“We have the timing of exact seconds from that video telling us, ‘Okay, here is when they’re doing a jump, here’s when they’re doing a kick, here’s when they’re doing the Running Man,’” Jenkins said. “And then we can time what moves we want to do with that because the music is going to be at the same tempo, and the [Golden Girls] need to be matching that tempo.”
Culmer said that his team also had to consider choosing moves fans could see from a distance in the large stadium.
At the game, Spot raised fans’ spirits amid the gloomy sky and dismal Missouri score of 10-45 at the half. Marching Mizzou, the Golden Girls and Spot successfully performed their halftime show on Faurot Field. Audience members cheered for Spot as the robot showed off its variety of flashy moves.
Jenkins said he hoped fans would leave the stadium with a sense of pride for what sets MU’s IT program apart from other universities.
“We have all of this technology at our fingertips, and we want to start utilizing it,” Jenkins said. “We want to make a name for ourselves across the country … and this is just step one — we have so much other stuff in the works.”
Knopps and Culmer also said they wanted the performance to showcase what MU students and faculty can achieve through collaboration.
“We do great things here at Mizzou,” Knopps said. “This collaboration is highlighting not only a great partnership with us and the College of Engineering, but really uplifting what’s possible here on campus, and that’s exciting.”
Edited by Emmet Jamieson | emmetthejamieson@themaneater.com