Slashdot Mirror
World's Fastest Robot Versus the Wiimote
kkleiner writes "Adept's Quattro, a placement and sorting arm, took the title of fastest robot last year, but it was only recently during National Robotics Week that it met its most gruesome opponents: nerds with Wiimotes. Visitors tried to keep the Quattro from placing and sorting on a small mechanized platform by moving it using the Nintendo video controller. The bottom line is that when it comes to simplified and repetitive tasks there's really no beating robotic prowess."
Too bad the Quattro didn't get to celebrate by "sorting and stacking" a few nerds ;-)
The bottom line is that when it comes to simplified and repetitive tasks there's really no beating robotic prowess
It all depends on the simple, repetitive task.
Sorry about the mess.
I, for one, welcome our new Quattro overlords.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
The bottom line is that when it comes to simplified and repetitive tasks there's really no beating robotic prowess.
Now if they can just teach the robot to play MMORPGs!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You took a robot, capable of crunching numbers at speeds in excess of a thousand calculations per second, programmed it and engineered it to perform a specific task, and then wanted to see if humans, who take 1/5th of a second just to react, can't do any more than a few SIMPLE calculations in a second, and had them use the worlds laggiest controller, and wanted to see who would win?
Is this like, one of those Hypothesises that's bound to be true by the laws of physics, but you gotta test it anyways?
Bishop, do the knife thing again...
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_surgery
When my mother had her hip replaced, the surgeon said that robot-replaced hips lasted longer due to better hole size and placement, (they make a hole in your bones and hammer the replacement joint in...)
As for this kinda flaky 'robots vs. humans' story:
1. We'll never be able to beat a robot's reaction times {see note} speed and/or raw power, but
2. Until AI improves, we'll still be the ones programming the things
Note: What was that SciFi story about humans being 'paired' with cats in order to have both high intelligence and inhumanly fast reaction times?
Quattro: Bite my shiny metal ass.
Nerd w/ Wiimote: It doesn't look so shiny to me.
Quattro: Shinier than yours, meatbag.
Go to the linked article (yes, yes, do it anyway). Skip the Wii demo video that forms the basis of the post because it really isn't interesting. Go to the second video. Watch it.
Holy frick. Robotic vision and control has come a long way.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Whenever I see these reports, it makes me wonder about the implications on manufacturing. Someone in the US or Europe can't/won't compete with someone in China working 15 hour days in a sweatshop for 50 cents an hour, and so from the company's standpoint, it makes economic sense to move. But will the rise in robotics cause a return of manufacturing? You will still need some people working in the factory maintaining the robots and what-not, but it may be cheaper to manufacture things closer to their destination rather than manufacturing them in a developing country and shipping them.
It's been known for a long time that robots and computerized systems are vastly superior to humans at simple tasks, their only downside is the upfront cost and often inflexibility.
One of the neatest applications I saw recently was in a factory where macadamia nuts were shelled. The nuts would pass through a big set of rollers, cracking the shells open. Then, the shell casings and the nuts would fall down, and a computer vision system would detect the nuts and the shells. Everything then fell through a collection of compressed air blowers, that would precisely blow the macademia nuts out of the stream of falling shells onto a conveyor platform, while the shells would fall seperated into a hopper off to somewhere else.
This is equivalent to testing how well a machine can put parts onto a variable speed conveyor belt. It is industrially useful, but not particularly interesting.
TFA's claims that 'the competition in the video above would have been closer if the platform had moved faster, but then you’re really talking about machine vs. machine.'
We are already talking about a machine vs. a machine. Pitting a specialized machine against a more basic machine will generally have one outcome. As the response speed of the platform controlled by the wiimote is slower than that of the robot, the human will always lose. Winning under these constraints is impossible.
The good news? Nintendo is releasing Stack Up for the Wii.
The bad news? R.O.B. will cost around $50k.
I am so going to have fun when they release Gyromite. When one of those suckers gets loose it won't just destory your TV, it'll take out your entire living room.
So is there really any instance of a human being able to beat a robot at repetitive tasks? I mean, isn't the whole point of a manufacturing robot supposed to be to speed up the process? Can a human do any manufacturing process better?
Apparently the robot has access to the position of the platform. It would only be really impressive if it was using computer vision to see where a platform is. All this proves is that it can do some simple math and move really fast.
Most of the packaging tasks that this machine performs are done by third-world workers who earn less than $5000 a year. Especially technology items: your new Microsoft mouse or iPod was packaged in China by workers who live at the factory and work long, long hours
That fancy robotic pick & place machine is impressive and it's much faster than a human. But it's not faster than a bunch of humans and when those humans are Chinese they cost much, much less than the robot (and its custom "workplace") does. The Chinese workers are so overworked that their ten minute breaks are used as an opportunity to get a few minutes of sleep. Here's the pick and place machine that packs Microsoft mice: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1266643/Microsofts-Chinese-workforce-tired-stay-awake.html They're just the tip of the iceberg, there's over 500,000 Chinese "pick and place" machines in service today.
And there are some business concerns that the robot can't address; it can't see or do anything it wasn't programmed for and the real world isn't quite that neat and tidy. And when there's a "failure" you'll have to wait for the robot technician - and hope that he has the parts on hand. If you're using Chinese workers they don't have these problems; humans are very, very good at dealing with the unexpected - and if one gets sick or hurt you just put another worker in that position and the line continues to operate.
This is kind of like reporting that modern CPUs can perform more floating point operations per second than humans...
Robots can also accomplish quite complicated tasks as well. I've built robots that could change the tools and fixtures that they depend upon and cross feed conveyors which were also robots of a sort. When these units have computerised saws, lathes and mills as well as doing assembly the only issue is economic viability due to the skilled employees needed to modify and service the systems. But a wide variety of product can be quickly produced. In essence this is the American approach to robotics in industry. Japan placed its bet on using lots and lots of very simple robots to produce a product. In some ways the Japanese method works out better so far. But that will change as the technology improves.
That's nothing. The Adept robot is in production. Here's what's working in the lab. Watch the fingered robot hand tie knots in a rope, dribble balls, and throw a cell phone in the air and catch it in a different grip, all at about 5x human speed or better. This system has 1ms visual reaction time.
Working at very high speed has advantages. Once the reaction time of the systems is faster than movement caused by gravity and other disturbances, flexible objects like ropes and cloth can be manipulated in a straightforward way.
...although I found the video pretty interesting to watch. One thing, though: isn't there much more inertia in the Wiimote / tablet system than there is within the entire robot ? And if so, doesn't that skew the whole game in the robot's favor ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
A robot does fine at packing uniform objects into uniform packages, but good luck finding one that can pack your shipment from Amazon.com, or do basic construction work, or pull the ingredients for 50,000 gallons of Coca Cola off of shelves in a warehouse and mix them all together for you. There is still a lot of dull, brain-killing, menial work for humans to do. If you work in an office and have never set foot in any kind of industrial operation, you'll probably be surprised at how much stuff still needs to be done by humans.
Mythbusters influence strikes again.
Ahh yes, like whether a beer bottle inflicts more damage (when wielded as a club) depending on whether it's empty or full... like they'd never heard of Newton's second law.
Seems to me that if the conveyor being controlled by the Wiimote could possibly go faster than the robot could track, then this would be kind-of interesting. My $0.02
The game.
I am impressed. As far as the reference to Lucy goes, think of the episode where she has taken a job in a candy factory.
Anyone notice that the actuator that the robot is picking from is VERY slow? If you want to see fun have a person hold the puck and wave it around.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Was on EG a few days ago
Is it just me or does the post placement analysis of the divots look like a a victory molestation?
impressive, but doesn't seem very fair since the speed of the platform appears to be pretty slow
John Henry told his captain, "Lord, a man ain't nothin' but a man. But before I let that steam drill beat me down, I'm gonna die with a hammer in my hand--Lord, Lord--I'll die with a hammer in my hand."
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
The second video which shows the robot performing actual packaging tasks is remarkable given how it used to be done.
We have used a previous version of the robot, it was called flexpicker back then. The fexpicker had quite impressing acceleration of 15G. It was quite scary experience to work near the robot even when it was stopped.
The specific application could, however, be implemented by using even slow robot. The trick is to use what's called conveyor tracking. The button panel is connected to encoder that is synchronized with robot coordinate system.
Usually a more complex version of the application is used: the target object is placed loosely on moving flatbelt conveyor, the robot has to locate it by using smart camera and only then it can pick.
(sorry about my bad english)
...to have seen the robot vs a person moving the tray. This wasn't robot vs human. This was robot vs wiimote lag. The video only serves to demonstrate my biggest problem with the Wii as a platform - it's far too imprecise for anything that doesn't require flailing the remote like a spaz.