Lady Gaga wowed the crowds at the Grammys with tribute performance to David Bowie. The performance featured a dancing keyboard, made possible by NASA Robotics experts Andy Robot and Brian Lim.
As a NASA Robotics expert, you might not expect to be called upon by Hollywood stars. But when Lady Gaga needed a robotic keyboard for her David Bowie tribute performance at the Grammys, Andy Robot was the only man for the job.
Robot (Andy Robot, that is) is a talented roboticist and computer animator who works with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). When Lady Gaga announced she would push the boundaries of art by incorporating technology into her live performance, Intel and The Recording Academy partnered together to make it happen, and that required the help of Robot and JPL’s Planetary Landing Testbed initiative Head Brain Lim.
And while the performance was flawless, many things went wrong leading up to the big day. Robot based the concept of the dancing robot on manufacturing ABB bots – the same kind used in BMW factories. He decided on these models for their near-zero error rate, and unparalleled level of quality, but the robots are extremely powerful and had a real potential to harm the artist.
To keep Gaga safe, Robot programmed the robots to move synchronously with the rhythm of the music. Once Gaga settled on the music, Robot programmed the manufacturing bots using a kind of inverse kinematics in time with Gaga’s sheet music – the same kind of movement that the human skeletal system utilizes when it moves (or, well, dances). This kind of movement allows the mobility of one part of a system without compromising another part by creating synchronized micro movements in subsequent parts of the system. By using this kinetic process, Robot was able to program the robotic keyboard stand to make the keyboard execute a controlled dance, without snapping the structure in half.
To everyone’s horror, when rehearsals began, things started going wrong. The keyboard used during the prototyping phase weighed less than the rose-gold one Gaga intended to use. As a result, the precise calculations Robot used when programming the bots was slightly off, resulting in choppy, sporadic movement. At worst, it could cause both the destruction of the keyboard and the injury of Gaga. This is when Lim came to the rescue with a little rubber.
Lim envisioned the system akin to a skeletal system moving without joints. Imagine walking without cushion between your leg bones and kneecaps. It could be done, but movement would be abrupt, painful, and likely to cause injury. Thus, by placing a layer of rubber underneath the keyboard, it gave the system the cushion it needed to function optimally, without going back to the drawing board.
In an interview with Mona Lalwani, Robot told the journalist that deploying the system during a live performance with only six minutes for set up was one of the most stressful professional situations he has experienced. Systems of this type typically take weeks to install, and perhaps hours to calibrate after the machines are powered on. For live performances, however, these luxuries go out the window. Robot and Lim had contingency plan after contingency plan, and after successfully wheeling the machine backstage (a feat in and of itself), the experts held their breaths and waited.
Thankfully, everything went according to Plan A, and Lady Gaga reveled in her success at expanding the boundaries of art yet again. Robot told Lalwani he was pleased with the artist aspect of the project, because the dancing keyboard worked as an extension of Lady Gaga and her extreme antics. We can only wonder which elite scientists will be called upon next to support the transformation of art into the Digital Age.
See more backstage footage of Lady Gaga and Robot on Intel’s InMusic page.
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