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

Obligatory.

[Mr_Rogerson]

I for one welcome our wii-capable overlords. ...first post ever, gimme a break right?

Re:Obligatory.

[utopianfiat]

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

Also, welcome to a week ago, slashdot.

Mirror

[Fred the computer]

Youtube video mirror here

Robotic Operating Buddy

[ChromeAeonium]

Its all fun and games until they become possessed by the angry ghost of R.O.B.

Time to Update the Clue Boardgame

[hedgemage]

The robot arm, in the server room, with the sword.

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.

Neat Implications

[slib]

This could be great for amateur robotics. Instead of painstakingly programming the subtle nuances of motion into a robotic arm/leg/whatever, perform the movement via WiiMote and record the motion. Although I'm sure people have been using similar methods for ages, using a Wii only requires an investment of 250 USD. Plus tax. Plus Zelda (purely for scientific purposes).

Re:Neat Implications

[Anonymous Coward]

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'.

What happens next...

[fahrbot-bot]

After a fun day of playing "Swordsman" with the robot they accidentally hand it the Wii remote... The police find their decapitated bodies two days later and a cold oil trail leading out of the building. In the distance a faint voice is heard, "Hello. My designation is Inigo Montoya. You reprogrammed my previous model; prepare to die."

Re:Military?

[binarybum]

you're right - let's slashdot the heck out of it so the military can't get to the website, 'cause as soon as some goofball in the military gets an idea about using "robots" as killing machines- whoa!

  Fortunately, this hasn't occurred to anyone but you.... yet.

Re:The perfect crime?

[Melfina]

With a long enough lag and some planning, it could make it look like the bot did it all on it's own >_>... hmm

Re:RUR-tastic...

[KDR_11k]

Certainly helps with those pesky highlanders.

Entertainment Application

[I'll Provide The War]

They should get together with these guys and start charging:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-747250219 7006303244

Re:Looks like...

[wintersynth]

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.

Re:The perfect crime?

[Cappy Red]

"With a long enough lag and some planning, it could make it look like the bot did it all on it's own >_>... hmm"

It wouldn't be the first time someone was killed by lag... or so they always claim.