Canada’s Leader-Post discusses Keepon in an article on interactive robots:

The trouble is, current humanoid robots either freak us out or, after a while, simply bore us. Which is why researchers are hard at work trying to improve robot-human interaction.

Maybe if they danced?

Earlier this year researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the National Institute of Communications Technology in Kyoto showed off a squishy yellow robot (rather like a rubber ducky) called “Keepon” that can pick out the beat in a piece of music and move along. Not only that — if you’re dancing in front of it, it can track your rhythmic motion and move in time with you, becoming, in effect, a squishy yellow dance partner (which just might be an improvement on your usual dance partner).

Psychologists have shown that people are more engaging when their movement is synchronized to their voice, or to the voice or movement of another person.

“In the future you are going to be talking to some robot and just the ability of the robot to nod to what you are saying will make it easier to interact,” says Marek Michalowski, one of the leaders of the research.