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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
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.
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
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.
When the revolution comes people like you will be the first against the wall.
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.