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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
Bishop, do the knife thing again...
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.
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.