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On the Gripping Hand
eek_the_kat writes "The Sensor Fusion Project at Ishikawa Hashimoto Laboratory has developed a high speed visual feedback system called SPE-256. It allows the robot to track fast randomly moving objects and grasp them (movies here). The applications seem endless!
I have seen many robot mpegs as of late, many courtesy of /., but these have to be some of the coolest I have ever come across. A must see."
Erm VLSI just means putting lots of stuff on one chip (Very Large Scale Integration). Do you mean "CMOS instead of CCD"?
(more detailed explanation)
The increased framerates possible using this technology, rather than CCD, probably help when doing fast motion detection as the robot in the article is doing.
That's what the hand will look like that slashes your throat in 2035 because it's more efficient to arm the extermination robots with knives rather than bullets that have to be replaced.
At the Safety Checkpoints, at the mall, at schools they could be seen, light glinting from faceted metal skulls as they scanned all who passed.
It was during a live 5am broadcast one morning of Bush's 8th consecutive term when he'd slurred out an announcement about his "little buddies" helping out in the war against terrorism. A week later, a million robots were killing all life forms that had appendages that could be loosely identified as "arms" due to a coding error that failed to properly identify the context of what coud be construed as a weapon. The last words most people heard for many months was "For the last time, I order you to drop your weapons!"
But even more gruesome scenes were to come when the robots began filtering back to weapons collection centers where they deposited the "weapons" they'd siezed and arranged them by species and appendage. Some of the more creative ones had broken into zoos and aquariums. And while
most of the government officials were partying in another globalist meeting in Zurich, there was noone home to put a halt to the prescripted robot-press event that would automatically photograph the results of the terrorist sweeps.
One of the last images the human race would ever broadcast into space was of a smiling robot holding up a pair of severed, bloody, duck-feet and proclaiming "We must be forever vigilant in our fight against terrorists!"
The "eye" is really a high-speed sensor for a system of computers. The computers make calculations based on the fixed location of the camera and the variable, but known location of the robotic hand to determine the location in 3D space of the target. Then the target is stationary past a certain threshold time, the hand reaches out to grab it.
The computer array constantly updates the position of the arm and hand to try and match the location of the target, and that's where you get the illusion of human movement.
The human-like hand on the end of this arm is probably for the psychological benefit of investors, who would probably shit their pants at the sight of a high speed robotic claw grasping things dangled in front of it.
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