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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?
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.
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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
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.
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
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.