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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."
can it catch a fly with chopsticks?
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.
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 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
Too late! There is already a card trick performing robot!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
What do you mean? A hard boiled or a raw egg?
Huh? I-- I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!
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
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
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.
Well to catch, say, a cricket ball, you need a certain amount of "give" when you make contact, otherwise it just bounces off your hand and out, and you've dropped it. Presumably, you just need to up the amount of "give" to catch something fragile?
I don't know how hard a softball (sic) is, but a cricket ball is solid cork wrapped in leather. And I have the bruises this morning to prove it, after playing at the weekend...
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They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
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.
When the revolution comes people like you will be the first against the wall.
collectively agreed to limit motorcycle's max speed to 300 kph (186.411 mph)
I know the imperialists always convert from mph to kph in this manner when telling us of the superiority of the imperial system that their imperial overlords insist on, however do we really have to stoop so low as to give the speed to 6 s.f.? Do we really think the limiters are accurate to less than one thousandth of a percent? That's like saying a running track is length-accurate to about the thickness of you fingernail.
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.
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.
"186 miles per hour (300 kph) - more than 270 feet per second."
Or 499,968.9936 furlongs per fortnight, if that helps you put things into perspective...
=Smidge=
Actually, if you'd look through all the videos on the site, it DOES catch an egg, uncooked, unfrozen. They just have it wrapped in saran wrap in case it breaks, so it doesn't ruin the robot arm. I found that video last friday.
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."
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.