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."

Comments

Re:So wait

[tlhIngan]

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?

It's a pick-and-place machine. Most PnP require that the inputs and outputs are stored in well-known locations, and have pretty basic image recognition software (they can tell if a black blob is in the wrong place, for example - if it was loaded wrong). Or to handle the slight misalignment of the source or destination.

In this case, the robot is picking and placing from and to a platform that can move arbitrarily, while it's even doing the picking and placing. That implies it not only knows it has to look for the source and destination, but recognize the platform and perform the task. Even if the thing it's grabbing suddenly decided to move under it while it's doing the picking or placing.

The human might be slower, but they're also a lot more unpredictable, so the robot has it use up its millions of calculations per second to figure out where things are and react when things start moving from under it.