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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."
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
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?
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.
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.