Japanese company Murata Manufacturing has revealed the Murata Cheerleaders, the company's third android model, to showcase the firm's ability in creating technological devices.

While the Murata Boy rides a bicycle and the Murata Girl rides a unicycle, the Murata Cheerleaders are balancing atop metal balls, flashing lights and dancing in unison while doing so.

Like Us on Facebook

The cheerleaders are utilizing gyroscopic sensors fitted with inverted-pendulum controls to maintain its vertical posture, which the company's Koichi Yoshikawa said was no easy feat. Even pushing the robot with moderate pressure to make it fall over is not enough to make Murata's creation fall flat on its back.

However, for a group of the balanced robots to dance simultaneously, the devices need to be equipped with microphones that can pick up ultrasonic audio and infrared sensors to recognize obstacles in their environment and figure out their relative locations.

With the help from researchers from Kyoto University, Murata has developed technology that aids the robots to communicate their positions, letting them act in uniformity. The dance routines are currently pre-programmed, but Yoshikawa said that the company is presently developing  a system to enable real-time editing of the robots' choreography.

Murata said that it has no plans on releasing the cheerleaders into the market. The project, instead, is the company's way of showboating its technological expertise, with the potential of putting the concepts to use in other industries.

The technology used in helping the robots deduce their locations in respect to their environment could be used, for example, in traffic control networks, to reduce the number of accidents on the road.

Similar vehicle-to-vehicle, or V2V, systems are being developed by General Motors and Ford.

"We believe that the wireless communication of sensor data could become a core infrastructure for the advanced integration of people and objects in smart societies," said Murata senior vice president Yuichi Kojima in a press release.

TagsRobotics, cheerleader, Cheerleading, vehicle-to-vehilce, Ford, GM, General Motors, Murata, Dancing Robot, Humanoid dancing robots