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World's Fastest Robot Versus the Wiimote

Posted by timothy on from the skynet-will-remember-your-taunting dept.

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."

7 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Quattro? by Kraftwerk · · Score: 5, Funny

    Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades

  2. So wait by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 3, Funny

    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?

    1. Re:So wait by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:So wait by Laser+Dan · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      I'm almost certain that the inputs and outputs ARE in well-known locations. As a robotics engineer, the first thing I noticed on looking at the video is that the movable part is mounted on a very solid, rigid, linear actuator. That thing knows the location of the plate to within microns. The second thing I noticed is that the plate that "moves arbitrarily" moves very smoothly with slow acceleration.

      So you have a high speed robot putting things on a very slowly moving (compared to the actuator speed) plate, the position of which is known precisely. It would be impressive if the plate could move in 2D or 3D and had a handle for people to move it around with, but as it is.. not impressed at all.

  3. reminds me of Aliens by TravTrav · · Score: 5, Funny

    Bishop, do the knife thing again...

  4. Re:really impressive by pz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder if one of the implicit advantages of a highly flexible, programmable robotic system like this, rather than special-purpose hardware, is manufacturing flexibility.

    I know that chocolate manufacturers need to retool their lines quite frequenty (Valentine's Day, Easter, etc.), and imagine that's true for lots of industries. Many of the examples from the second video are food handling: a processing plant that handles frozen burgers one week might be making chicken nuggets or fish sticks the next.

    --

    Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
  5. That's nothing. See this high speed robot hand. by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.