Slashdot Mirror
Robot Catches High Speed Objects
shpoffo writes "Engineers at the University of Tokyo in Japan have created a robot that can catch a ball moving faster than 186 miles per hour (300 kph) - more than 270 feet per second. It uses an array of photodetectors to directly control the three finger actuators - which can rotate 180 degrees in 0.1 seconds. It's only catching softballs at the moment, but operators are optimistic for it to soon catch other objects and grasp moving things. A video with odd sci-fi TV-series (coral cache) accents is available."
I for one welcome our new Joe DiMaggio-bot overlords. (I am so very sorry.)
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
- George Orwell
can it catch a fly with chopsticks?
Next milestone: - Catch high speed eggs.
I can't tell from the article and can't see the video (stupid firewall), but looking at the pictures it appears that the design only allows it to catch if the object is thrown straight at it, since it's just a hand. What would really be cool is if it was attached to a robotic arm that will move the hand to the right position to catch the ball.
I for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
No, seriously, all three digits are opposable.
It would be even nicer if it had an arm to intercept balls that weren't thrown precisely to it though.
Add a ball-throwing mechanism and you can watch two robots playing with eachother. If we are very lucky, humans won't have to have fun at all, we have robots for that.
11. Thou shall obey Da mighty Swing
I can also catch objects, with my body; hurts like hell though. Who needs hands?
Now I have somebody to play catch with :)
or magician ones, doing cards tricks all over around. Brr.
Java?!
I know the Japanese Robotic Mall Security guard was being made fun of here at /. but this is really cool - though it would be a nice step to see that hand attached to an arm attached to a humanoid robot who would actually have to go for the ball and not just have it thrown at it.
/
But all the Robotic news seems to be coming out of Japan lately, is anything being done in the US that compares?
Note: Not asking because I think the US should be in the lead but that it should compete for the benefit of all, definitely the US had the first industrial robot back in 1962 AFAIK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_robot
And it's rather sad to think we're lagging in this on the R/D side in new frontiers. Unless this should be the extent of it:
http://robots.engadget.com/entry/0657766019921755
looks more like 18.6 mph from the video
brush up, brush down
Can it file my taxes for me?. Imagine the thing playing the piano, or handing out packs of chips at the baseball! hoy, hoy, hyuuuup over there! evanism ;)
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
Am I missing something or does this work something similar to the lines of a fly catcher plant? Something is in my reach -> grab. All that is happening is that they have developed motors and photosensors fast enough so that they can do it at incredible speeds.
:(
The reality is that the robot has no idea what its catching. It doesn't know how to recognise a ball. The chances are that a fast moving object is easier to identify that a stationary one, as you just grab the thing that is moving rather than identifying a shape and deciding if that is the thing you want to collect.
Still an interesting technology showcase, but I'm still no closer to my robot slave
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
1) Make them big
2) One of these on Earth
3) One of these on the Moon
4) Make big ball-shaped transport vessels.
5) SPACE PROFIT!
Certainly a lot better than crappy shuttles that are critically damaged by bloody foam insulation.
Does your hand recognize a ball? Of course not, it's merely a tool used by your central control unit (brain) in order to catch what IT recognizes as a ball.
Similarly, this is one small component of what will eventually be one hellaciously competent robotic assistant. Put two (or ten!) of these hands on the ends of 'Doc Oc' style semi-autonomous arms and watch the fur fly! I hope they're on our side.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
"186 miles per hour (300 kph) - more than 270 feet per second."
Why not inches per year or any other useful unit?
meters per second or (if you really insist, kilometers per hour). No other units!
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
I can just hear it....
Number 5 is alive!!
Number 5 is alive!!!!
The most interresting part here is, this robot fingers can rotate and stay in precise contrôl very fast.
As mentioned, there is no arm and the area for interception is very tight. Building an arm mounted interceptor may raise serious problems with inertia though.
Time to think of a robotized pickpocket.
Léa Gris
Picking up an imprecise, reasonably fast throw to a particular area doesn't need catching ability : think of those coin collectors on toll gates which are just a funnel down to a small coin slot.
So it's really a display of fast reacting robotic actuators and a pretty cool photo detection in order to time the reaction correctly. As the guy quoted in the article says "It's an engineering feat really"
Real catching, in my opinion, can only be acheived if you can follow through with your hands to "take the speed off the ball" at least for hard objects. I think that a fast moving real baseball would be incredibly hard to catch robotically. A mitt is really useful because it allows the momentum to be absorbed into a wide area. In cricket, all fielders know they have to bring the ball in to their chest or follow its trajectory after catching impact to not lose the ball - they don't have a mitt. This robot couldn't catch a moving hardball no matter how fast its actuators are, because the kinetic energy has to be disspated properly, and with a heavy ball this energy is very high.
Pretty cool demo though. I think its applications will be rather more in the picking up of (reasonably slow) moving objects realm than any useful rôle in catching. If you want to catch soft balls all day long might as well just breed dogs.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Is there any chance such a contraption could be used to save some silly person's butt in case they decide to go that fast?
... can it throw it back? :-)
There's gotta be an application for this in the war against terror.
Wow this is great! Has anybody told the Ballistic Missile Defense Agency? Maybe they'll have more luck catching a missile than shooting it down!
== Shipwrecked and comatose
In the video, the ball has a very visible parabolic flight curve over the 2 meters distance. Either the video has been recorded on saturn, or the ball is flying much slower than they say.
But don't worry. The robots watching will be programmed to enjoy it.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Watching this made me think about the calculations involved in estimating the trajectory and how well the human brain does it.
While the raw maths is pretty simple by itself, when you factor in stereo image processing to see a ball, work out it's speed and trajectory, and move potentially hundreds of muscles into the correct position to catch the ball, you realise just how powerful the human brain is and how well it can adapt.
That will become really fun if it suddenly learns to throw the ball back at you at the same speed, just when you switched from a soft ball to a baseball (-:
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
"It's an extremely difficult task as the ball is moving so fast," says Ulrich Nehmzow, an expert in mobile robotics at the University of Essex, UK.
:)
Looking at the picture... wouldnt it have been alot simplier to do this purly mechanically.
I.e. have the strap (palm) joining the fingers pull them together when the ball hits it? It would be alot lighter too!
Photosensors, bah
Brick wall deflects high speed objects.
_______________________________________________
If you're bored give this a try:
http://www.nomorewhales.com/register.php?ref=2168
Steinbrenner has already optioned the contract on the robot for 2008. Apparently, he likes it because you can scream at it all day long and it doesn't get upset.
It will rid us of the last hurdle to just give up our legs and kill a certain scholarship system which promotes sports as an alternative to learning.
Finally being a couch potato will be the ultimate norm. Scream to your kids: Put the robots outside and do not temper with their accuracy this time, it already cost us a window this week!
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
I especially like the related articles on the right :
:)
# Robots find their feet with help of sonar
# Robot camel-jockeys take to the track
# Roaches get a robot buddy
Looks like serious science to me
At least as far as marketable robots are concerned. I asked a Sears VP whether any American companies were investing in robotics research, and whether they were interested in it. Her response was "The technology is in the Orient. They know to come to the US to handle marketing to Americans." When I was looking (2000), Japanese companies (at least the ones doing the insanely cool robotics stuff) weren't even acknowledging the labs' existence to English speakers. The only way I knew the labs existed was because the people running them gave talks at Robo-Cup Japan, and were listed with titles.
Can it catch a bus?
The Japanese industrial heartlands had a few difficulies around then. In particular Hiroshima and Nagasaki had infrastructure difficulties.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
the shit I get from wife. I need a proxy poop-receiver... will this robot do that for me?
Anybody have a torrent link ?
But the REAL question is, can it play football?
What's up with all these Japanese "sports" robots anyway? I mean, I know their sports teams suck, but surely they can just do like the US and buy all the good foreign players (ducking...)
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
this robot cant catch me!
The old "solution looking for a problem".
:)
Seriously, can I get this robot over here to uh.. catch balls for me?
Sorry, it is pretty cool I guess
In this particular video it's certainly not going 186 mph. I think throwing a ball at 186 mph would be a bigger feat than this robot catching a slower ball. Kind of neat though.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Cue that scene where Robocop catches a bullet fired to a police.
I've always wondered about the real physics of that scene, maybe robocop's fingers would be destroyed, or the bullet deformed... all that kinetic energy has to go somewhere...
Ok, back to work.
I could have done that too. Just make a Robot throw a ball [easy peasy], video it, and then play the video backwards...
>Akio Namiki and colleagues built the robot to test technologies that could some day make robots useful in situations where they may have to react at high speed.
Few Japanese robotics guys smoke something and make a robot and then spew the statements: "This robot is for those occassions where they have to be used in ". If they accidentally come up with a robotic sledgehammer..they'll just say that it is to break coconuts rather than to break human heads.
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
Sure, it can play catch... But can it form an heart-warming relationship with a sassy Kourier, defend Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, and take down a low-flying jet by jumping into its engine? No? PRIORITIES, PEOPLE!
In the video, the ball has a very visible parabolic flight curve over the 2 meters distance.
The parabolic flight curve actually makes this a harder task. If the equations of motion were purely linear, then it would be a simple task to calculate future position. The second order nature of the trajectory mean that a little more maths is needed to predict where to catch it. Much of the maths for this sort of thing uses matrices (read linear algebra) which would fall over for this task.
I seem to recall that human cricketers use a simple technique for solving this problem. As they are running to catch the ball they move so the ball is kept at a constant angle in their field of view. Keeping this angle constant ensures that the ball will neatly arrive in their hands. Or so the theory goes.
I've long thought that catching a ball would be a great research project, mainly due to the quadratics calculations involved, great to see it realised.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
What are they going to do next? I mean android girl, (well the upper half of her) Robot who catches balls. When are they going to get around to the serious matters?
And by that I mean anti Godzilla measures? Seriously they can't afford to rebuild Tokyo every time a Sci Fi Director gets a whim to redo Godzilla can they? I say NAY! We must stop the green lizard as soon as possible, and his friend Monthra, let's see some Mecha people.
What some countries need are robotic fans that are programmed NOT to erupt in violent riots at the drop of a hat at every soccer game.
(I say 'soccer for the benefit of the US readers, but I realize elsewhere in the world its called football.)
And they said zombies weren't real!
...catch bullets in their teeth. Not everyone succeeds, but some do!.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
The future of tank's anti-missile defense. Robotic arm that sweeps grenades and missiles away...
Its been said publicly by Bush that we like illegal aliens for cheap labor (maybe other Presidents as well).
I, for one, would be in favor of an illegal alien president (couldn't do worse than the current pres). Alas, however, only NATURAL BORN citizens can be president.
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
pak chooie unf
There's no place like ~/
http://unbolted.llarian.net/demo.wmv
... our super fast baseball playing overlords.
Next up - robot Jackass. Maybe they'll catch bullets in their teeth and jump out of airplanes over bodies of molton metal with parachutes that are too small, only to emerge with their metallic skin mostly gone, to say something stupid and dramatic like "beep".
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
One day !..ok ...robots have become an indispensable tool nowadays !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Think of a swallow snagging insects mid-air, or a falcon diving at 180mph to grab a rabbit, or a frog catching flies with its tongue.
Amphibian brains outperform this robot.
Screw the robot... how do you launch a softball at 190mph? I believe that has a more useful application.
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
Just make a robotic batter and a robotic pitcher and we'll have everything we need for the first robotic blernball league!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That'd be a real test.
Since we're on the topic, you can find some clips of some work I did way back in 1995 on robotic catching at http://www.mit.edu/nsl/www/. The arm can only catch underhand tossed objects. The trajectory is planned to match position and velocity with the object and then decelerate along a smooth path. This allows for a greater window of time for closing the hand. Removing the matching constraint allows the arm to catch faster objects, but then the limiting factor becomes the vision system (60fps) and the timing of hand closure. We also added in some aerodynamic predictors that let us catch paper airplanes, but those are much harder to throw back.
Robot Deer Hunter. Put it in the tree and come back in 4 hours.
For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
It seems to me that's pushing the definition of robot a bit much. It's a grabber that closes when something approaches it. The ball is thrown straight at it. It seems more like the doors at the supermarket that open when you approach. Of course, the doors won't open fast enough for people moving at 186 mph but it's the same general principle.
The impressive thing about all this is that I was able to download the 9+MB video, first try, using the link on Slashdot's front page, in about 15 seconds. Now that's technology!
Wake me when someone builds a working pusher robot...don't bother me with this "hand robot" jibber jabber.
Call me when it can snatch bullets out of the air.
it is difficult conceive of ways that such a robot could be used today. "It's an engineering feat really
Stealth
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I can't wait until there is an arm attached to the hand programed to catch softballs. There will be story about the first accident this arm caused when some intern ust happened to walk by the arm holding a softball and its photosensors noticed it. Bye bye hand...
Brilliant! I would like to thank the poster for using the coral cache link. This way we *all* get to see the video without crashing the server! (And no thinks to the "editors," who are too backwards to do it themselves, or god forbid - automate it)
Look closely at the ball after it's caught. It's not even a real softball. Look at the dimples around the fingers (thumbs?) It's more like a white foam spongy nerf ball. I assume this is to make the ball light and have it deform to absorb the energy at impact.
i watched the video and i have to tell you that it doesn't look like 186 mph to me. the ball gets there in maybe .5 or .75 seconds, and it's traveling maybe 6 feet. i dunno, someone else can do the math, but the ball is not going anywhere near the speed they are claiming.
1. Create Robot That Catches Ball 2. ??? 3. Profit!
Falling behind in (humanoid) robot technology would be a source of national shame. Haven't you ever watched anime or read manga?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Kids can't really catch things until they are about 4 or 5, and can't really catch things going fast until they are 9 or 10. How many computers are given 10 years of constant trials to work out a problem like this?
Teams often approach problems like this with design engineering, trying to create a system that can accomplish these incredible processing/coordination tasks when you turn them on the first time.
The human learning process is more like prototyping, where the system fails for thousands of times over years before it begins to achieve success. The closest thing in software engineering is probably advanced data mining, where you simply present the system with a data set of initial conditions and successful outcomes, and let it design its own algorithms to get from one to the other. The more testing and tweaking you perform, the more reliable the system gets.
That's not to take away from the incredible complexity of the system that does the learning--the human body. But a big factor in accomplishing such complex tasks is the time and reps that are involved in the learning itself.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The original article states that the robotic arm catches "soft balls", meaning nerf-like foam balls. The slashdot posting mis-quotes it, saying that it can catch "softballs", which are significantly different (and very difficult to catch, since they are heavy, hard, and smooth)
A cousin of mine was doing graduate school research in robots in The Netherlands. His advisor told him he was working on a tennis-playing robot. Pretty cool toy. My cousin quit the program when he learned the device was actually intended for the battle field to swat incoming grenades. Not sure how much further the project went.
An array of 32 by 48 individual photo detectors in its "palm", tracks a ball's trajectory at high speed. And a series of specialised image processing circuits recognise this movement almost instantly.
If a ball was flying right at YOUR eyes at
any speed, you'd catch that mother too!
man, I feel like mold.
Is it just me or did anyone else notice the "Cyberdyne Systems" trade mark on the under side of one of the four fore-fingers. I tell you, this is the begining of the end! Bet they found it in one of their factories!
I was really interested until I found out this was a fixed-position "hand" and not an actual robot arm. I thought they had built one of those hand-eye coordination robots that could catch balls faster than the ones that catch them being tossed. Oh well. To me, this seems more like just a mechanical trap with an optical switch.
Bender: Clem Johnson? That skin bag wouldn't have lasted one pitch in the old Robot Leagues! Now Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern hitting machine!
Leela: Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns! I mean come on! Wireless Joe was nothing but a programmable bat on wheels.
Bender: Oh and I suppose pitching at 5000 was just a modified howitzer.
Leela: Yep.
Bender: You humans are so scared of a little robot competition you won't even let us on the field.
Fry: What are you talking about? There's all kinds of robots down there.
Bender: Yeah doing crap work! They're bat boys, ball polishers, sprinkler systems. But how many robot managers are there?
Fry: Eleven?
Bender: Zero! [He throws his bottle on the floor and it breaks. A small robot comes out and cleans it up.] And what a surprise! Look who's scraping up the filth! Is it a human child? I wish!
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
There is no way on God's Green Earth that the ball in the d/l video is moving anywhere close to 300 kph!! Not to say that the article is a sham, but is the video even associated with the current news release??
Finance an new movie entitled "Bad News Bots?"
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
that or blogging.
wouldn't a bucket be a much simpler solution than the fingers? Fingers are good for being able to adapt to a wide variety of precision jobs - catching things at high speed seems like a specialized task better suited for a bucket.
ôó
That's because everybody in the US is too busy bragging about how they're the best at everything. Well... that or polishing their guns.
So how long before they begin to be used in baseball games? The catcher's job is not a nice one, seems to be a good candidate for replacement by a robot.
Just don't run near it too fast naked!
Aiyyeeeeeee!!!!!!If I was asked to build a device that could catch balls moving at high speed, I would want to call it Annette.
In the video, the robotic hand is catching the ball with its fingertips, which to a human would be an incredibly difficult thing to do -- akin to catching a fly with chopsticks. A human would wait until the object being caught is somewhat within the opened hand before grasping and making the catch, which is probably more secure. However, I can certainly understand the need to catch the ball BEFORE it impacts the visual sensors in the palm of the robot hand.
Also, the idea of putting the sensors in the hand itself is nothing short of brilliant -- no more parallax correction to worry about. This is something our wetware is quite capable of dealing with, it's a survival function of just about every animal with eyes. Sometimes you just don't WANT your eyes and your hands (or paws) in the same plane. For one thing, eyes are delicate. For another, it's much easier to determine the distance to something if you've got a slight angle on it as you watch.
This makes me wonder -- is there another sensor outside the hand to assist in calculating the trajectory of the inbound ball? Or is there still a need to pre-select the ball size and speed?
Also, it seems to me that if you can make a robot catch a ball, you can also make a robot hit, kick, or punch a ball. These methods may lead to considerable improvements in "sporting" robots in general, such as those used in the Robocup. It was probably possible to build a golfbot before, since the ball isn't moving when you hit it, but this would broaden the potential applications to sports using a moving ball. I'd imagine such a robot would make an incredible table tennis player, since that game is all about reactions and doing something with the ball at the moment you hit it (impart spin, "deaden" the shot, take sharp angles) and doesn't require much running around. If said robot can keep the ball down, it's not going to be involved in the slamfests you see on ESPN2 with players running around 20 feet behind the table. That doesn't happen until someone makes the mistake of elevating the ball.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Sure, 186 mph is cool. But 186232 mph would really be a lot more fun...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
First thought:
That's a decent fraction of the way to catching a bullet.
Because there's nothing more badass than catching bullets. I remember applying my early physics to try to work out a scenario in which a person, given a silly amount of luck, could physicall catch a bullet fired at them.
Maybe a tough hand, a snapping motion, and a lot of sudden rotation . . . inertia . . . physics . . . I need sleep.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Anybody notice the upper finger squashing the ball before tossing it back? Just how powerful are those finger things anyway? I and a coworker both noted it looked really creepy/scary in particular I got the shivers watching the fingers all fold up (reminded me of the send off gesture in Mars Attacks) and then open like a flower. I don't think you want to shake hands with anything that can stop a ball that fast, moving faster than you can see, and keep saying "Bring it on!"
Incidentally, a researcher in TFA amazingly denegrates it as "an engineering feat" saying there is no practical use for it. Until you realize that it would also be useful for a robot body or arm moving at 186 mph with respect to its environment, or another person. How about mounting this thing on one of those fast wheeled drones and using it to pluck guns out of insurgent's hands? I could also see this used in a tentacle that has circular cross sections that can individually rotate 180 degrees in 0.1 seconds, making for a spectacularly dangerous whiplike appendage. They should send a robotics researcher to film school, seriously.
I, for one, welcome our new Robbie Hammock-bot overlords. He's the guy who caught Randy Johnson's perfect game against the Atlanta Falcons in 2004, Hammock being on the receiving end of 98 MPH fastballs all night long.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Rich people could purchase their very own Mr Miyagi Fly Trap (TM)
Without precision, my life would be imprecise....
Re:LAME? WTF?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
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by LoudMusic (199347) on 14:52 Tuesday 23 October 2001 (#2467504)
Raise your hand if you have iTunes
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port
Raise your hand if you have both
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
~LoudMusic