The Qingdao Beer Festival likes to boast that it is the largest beer festival in Asia, and to cement its place in history the festival organized a robotic world record over the July 30-31 weekend. The World Record for Robots Dancing Simultaneously is now 1007, broken by an army of robots each named QRC-2. There were 1040 robots set up to perform the sixty second dance but some did not move or toppled over so they did not count in the final total.
Qingdao tech firm Ever Win Company & Ltd built the robotic dance party and now hold the World Record. The display was done for publicity and to advertise Ever Win’s encryption technology that they say will reduce radio frequency interference from Bluetooth or wireless devices. One smart phone is said to have commanded all of the robots to dance in unison, but there aren’t reports on whether the smart phone’s signal range was boosted or if each robot spoke to adjacent robots.
Some internet comments say that this is only as technical as one remote turning on 1,000 television sets, or a short leap from a world record attempt at setting up and knocking down a long domino train. There’s definitely a lot of planning, set up, logistics, and hard work that goes into a project this big, especially one with such a public focus. The dedication to the project, craftsmanship, and perseverance to set up 1040 robots is mind boggling and this is just as involved as a technician setting up a validation test or photonics companies finding a new way to beam particles from one point to another. Several other robots were on display at the festival - art robots, guide robots, robots that served ice cream, robots to solve Rubik's Cubes, and most importantly robots to open beers.
Oddly enough this almost doubled the previous record of ‘Most Robots Dancing Simultaneously’ that was set in April by 540 robots dancing at the CCTV Spring Festival in Shenzhen, China. Twenty four staffers from UBTECH Robotics set up 540 of their 1.5 kilogram, 398 millimeter tall Alpha 1S robots to perform as back up dancers at the festival. These records might appeal to the maker in us more than the hardcore analytical engineer, but it’s hard to reject the amazing visuals of robots dancing in unison. I’m hoping that within the next year we’ll get to see another robotic army dance in pursuit of another world record.