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Wii Hacked To Control Sword-Wielding Robot
ianchaos writes "WiiBot is the pet project of two engineers who apparently have way too much cool hardware and time on their hands. These two guys figure that as long as you have a Kuka KR16 industrial robot to work with, why not see if you can control it with the Wii Remote? The result is a tennis-playing, sword-wielding mechanical arm that simultaneously captures 'weekend of nerdy fun' and 'accident waiting to happen' in a fun two minute video. The website even details the technical aspects of teaching a robot to parry."
Youtube video mirror here
I may be wrong here, but if I'm reading them correctly, they STILL had to manually program the movement sequences (using the robot's built-in 6D controller). Then they had to hand-code roughly analogous coordinates into the software. Finally, they calculated what the user was doing based on the accelerometers in the Wii-Mote, and did a fuzzy match on the 6 actual, 5 practical pre-coded motions, selecting the closest match and performing it.
This meant that the robot could do a handful of simple, pre-defined motions, and the Wii-Mote was simply used to select the closest available match. Not saying it isn't cool, but it's a far cry from programming the robot with a Wii-Mote. I'm not entirely sure those robots could even handle the amount of data it would take to real-time mirror a Wii-Mote. These machines are designed to do a handful of carefully pre-recorded motions (typically one), over, and over, and over, and over for years with near perfect accuracy. Not to mention the fact that there's really no direct way to translate the accelerometer data from a Wii-Mote into useful, sensical motions for a 3-jointed mechanical arm (or any robot, for that matter.) So even if the poor thing could somehow handle that much incoming data, figuring out what data to send it in the first place would be damn near impossible.
What they're doing is cool as hell, but they're not programming the robot with the Wii-Mote. They're controlling it, just like the headlines says. Just sayin'.
We actually have a second server at http://www.usmgarage.com/ that will take you to a mirror of the page. If you're going to have your server beaten to death with HTTP requests, the Slashdot crowd is not such a bad way to go.