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."

Comments

Military?

[suyashs]

I fear the military applications of this...not like it wasn't possible before, but perhaps this might give some people ideas that would ultimately be used to kill people.

Re:Military?

[suv4x4]

I fear the military applications of this...not like it wasn't possible before, but perhaps this might give some people ideas that would ultimately be used to kill people.

Yea... the military implications.. Well, if someone told you to go into an empty room and go very very near to a robot that's holding a sword, just, you know, don't do it.

Plus it's still easier and cheaper for An Actual Human to simply shoot you with a conventional gun, rather than use Wii-eqipped sword holding robots.

Re:Military?

[kabocox]

I fear the military applications of this...not like it wasn't possible before, but perhaps this might give some people ideas that would ultimately be used to kill people.
Yea... the military implications.. Well, if someone told you to go into an empty room and go very very near to a robot that's holding a sword, just, you know, don't do it.
Plus it's still easier and cheaper for An Actual Human to simply shoot you with a conventional gun, rather than use Wii-eqipped sword holding robots.

Actually, after reading that and thinking of the real world military apps. Civilian transport drivers. Mount a camera in a tranport and have the steering mapped just like some game. You don't need to throw guns on it or have it kill people. You just need the bandwidth for driving center state side could drive all the transport and civilian driveable traffic around. Heck, you could do similar things with big rigs in the US if you had gas stations that could fuel by robot. Instead of big rig drivers having to travel all over the country or work odd hours: they could all work 8 hours jobs in central communication centers and just hand off the trucks to the next driver when their shift is over. The central communication centers could be anywhere in the globe as long as it was close enough and with enough bandwidth. The problems start when you make a list of repairs and such that a human could easily do, yet you'd have to park the rig and await a maintenance team to arrive and service it if you where using remote control tech.

Where this has the best long term use is space. If we could have remote controlled drivers here, we should be able to have remote controlled construction equipment as well. We aren't there, yet.

Re:Obligatory.

[utopianfiat]

I for one welcome our monkey-with-modpoint overlords. :/

Also, welcome to a week ago, slashdot.

Re:I for one...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Already saw it a week ago on Engadget."

That's really fascinating. BTW, have you ever looked into how Slashdot gets its stories? I'll give you a hint, they don't have any reporters.