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Stanford Students Build "JediBot"
An anonymous reader writes "By combining a dexterous robotic arm, a foam-padded lightsaber, the movement tracking capabilities of Microsoft's Kinect sensor, and some clever software, students at Stanford University have created what can only be called a JediBot. Using a series of pre-programmed 'attack moves', and Kinect to detect the location of the enemy's light saber, JediBot can attack and defend with surprising grace. For now its attack moves are fairly slow — it can only attack once every 2 or 3 seconds — but presumably you could tweak a knob (and remove the foam padding) to turn JediBot into a real killing machine." I look forward to model that can also "force choke" an opponent.
Just add a massive capacitor or tesla coil, maybe?
till the bot spazzes out and whops some one ... then its just fun
May the FORCE be with you!! :D
Nothing here... So... SHOOO!!!
But with the blast shield down, I can't even see! How am I supposed to fight?
This seems to me to be a grievous mistake.
I welcome our new jedi-bot overlords!
Indiana Jones shoots it with a gun that the stupid Jedi can only block if it doesn't slow down the 'story' progression.
An unmanned NASA probe made history 117 million miles from Earth on Saturday (July 16) when it arrived at the huge asteroid Vesta, making it the first spacecraft ever to orbit an object in the solar system's asteroid belt.
The Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta after a four-year chase and will spend about a year studying the huge space rock before moving on to visit another asteroid called Ceres.
Vesta is a huge asteroid about the size of the U.S. state of Arizona, and is also the brightest asteroid in the solar system. It is located in the asteroid belt, a band of rocky objects that encircles the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
I want a Robotic Not-So-Dummy! Give it another arm, and teach it kung fu!
the video was much less cool than the summary made it sounds
I mean, as a race of bags of mostly water, we're just asking for it.
I'm incline to say it's some kind of assembly because of the ALL CAPS and line comments starting with a ;. OTOH, it looks a bit like Perl, but not quite. Anybody know? (freeze frame at 1:51 to see what I'm talking about)
Being drunken students they'd go sleep it off and forget about it the next day but the injuries and micro-misalignments in the spine would have festered.
Bah, when I was a student that was just the sign of a good night out.
Prior Art?
Prior Patents?
Infringement?
Yours In Moscow,
Kilgore Trout
Could this robot potentially violate the first and second laws of Robotics?
1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
As a long time swordfight student and instructor, I have to say that putting a stick in the grip of an industrial robot does not make it a sword fighter.
For example, the obvious mistake seen in the video is that the robot strikes at the *weapon*, not the *person*. As any 1st year fencing student knows, you can't win the fight that way. I love fighting nubies who make that mistake.
We have a term for this - it's called "Erroll Flynn" fighting, and it refers to those cheap movie swordfight scenes where the actors aren't skilled enough to actually fight without putting out their opponent's eye. Stay far enough away so that you can't hit the opponent, and cross swords in mid air. Clack... Clack... Clack... now low: Clack... Clack... Clack... now high...
Let's have a robot that holds a broom and say it's a sweeping robot! Or a robot that holds a hose and say it's a car washing robot! Or a robot that holds a trimmer and say it's a hedge-trimming robot.
Wake me when it can detect an opening in the opponent's defense and strike at it.
But can the JediBot join the jedi church? Or is its flashy orange garment considered too sinful?
I love how many layers there are in this post. It's like one big extended metaphor of crazy.
That's the most informative and non-controversial troll post I've ever seen. Next you'll pretend to be on-topic or something.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
Ya... it's inspiring.
After reading this I'm thrown into the moral dilemma between: "Forming a parents group to fight the injustice in the world that would even allow such a creation to exist let alone be exposed to 'The Children'" OR "Breaking into the lab myself to steal the Jedi-Bot and arm it properly." /. poll?
Obviously fake there were women in the class.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I'm sure the retail version will include a WiFi dog collar to "force choke" the player. Friends of David Carradine will find an alternate use.
Towards the end of the video you can see that they programmed in Basic. "No. No. That's not true. That's impossible! Noooooooo!"
Is that what we're calling it these days?
Yeah, to be honest, I look forward to a robot that can "force choke" it's "opponent" too.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
I thought this would be something like that floating ball thingy that you're supposed to hit. Something based on the recent japanese flying orb thingy.
They will really have something when they can program a robot to be your dance partner.
After all the Adobe Flash bashing on /., you'd think they wouldn't publish an article on the frontpage with a flash object in it.
Sheesh.
When will he appear?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
In 'attack mode', it's following a set of pre-determined attack moved. Not even randomly determined. Boring.
But in 'defence mode', it's impressive, tracking the opponents sword and moving to block it. Very nice. Would be cool if it could move faster... but that's just a factor of time - next year's version will be twice as fast, and the year after twice as fast again...
That one? no.
a real industrial one? yes.
I have seen an industrial robot glitch and throw a whole car engine 90 feet and through a wall so fast that I am sure if it was outside the car would have easily went a football field.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I loved this one: "And I won't bother going into the issue of all that infrared radiation spewing from the Kinect sensor."
OMG. RADIATION! Oh wait. Infrared radiation is... heat. Plain, simple, heat.
Hey Dr. Bob. You know your lightbulbs? They're putting out RADIATION OMG!
Chiropractic is quackery
But most of all, Bob you trolling quack, the main reason everybody mods you into oblivion is that no matter what the damn slashdot topic actually is, you always twist it into an excuse for shilling chiropracty. The topic could be 64-bit firefox, ethernet, Bill Gates and Toilets, it doesn't matter, you twist into another advert for your own snakeoil. You obviously don't care about the actual topic or slashdot; you just want to advertise your ailing business and that's the only reason you're here.
You're a just a spammer, and a spammer of quackery which is the lowest form of spammery.
This is not the place to shill your business, be it car repair, carpentry, origami, or quackery (as in your case). This is not an ad forum. Stick to the damn article topic or GTFO.
You've constructed. The ability to wiffle-bat an opponent is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
Bob Anderson wasn't a fencing choreographer. He was actually the British and Canadian national fencing coach.
Since we're in an academic frame of mind: JediBot should be called, JediArm. It's just a robotic arm, which moves 100x slower than a ABB flexpicker, which can easily do the same thing. Likely using a kinect too given the chance.
There is a limit of doubling the jedi-robot speed each year - at some point, they will start adding more swords.
I really wish they had shown a bit more of the defense bit, instead of shoving that at the end of the video.
I found that far more interesting than a sequence of pre-programmed attacks.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
She's hot!
In attack mode it's using a series of pre defined motions. Nothing exciting here.
In defense mode it senses the users location of their 'sword' then adjusts to meet it. Aside from interfacing with kinect and the robot, nothing exciting going on.
Seems to me like this robot is being created for more complex tasks and this video is a foundation. Kind of neet to see the current stage. Big waste of time for students if something more doesn't come out of it.
Where is the video of the still-to-be-debugged prototype that grabs a golf ball retriever and randomly shakes it around?
We see numerous announcements on Slashdot where some researchers or company has made a "breakthrough in X", and experts on this very forum roundly lambast them for being nothing new, nothing important, nothing innovative, or "10 years to market".
This is one of those announcements.
Attaching a stick to a robot is *not new*. It's obvious and even trivial when you think about it. Similar for using a kinect to sense a stick and react to it...
I'll repeat this once more: it's NOTHING NEW. It's not innovative or a breakthrough, it's nothing important.
Car analogy: We've mounted a camera and servos on a car, soon we'll have autodriving vehicles!
It's not a technology in it's infancy that only needs a few years to mature. The bulk of the technology, the important bits that need to be addressed, lie in the software.
It's slow - so what, that's not the issue. It responds to a green stick - so what, that's not the issue. It's a prototype and a little rough - so what, that's not the issue. It's done by students and cut them a little slack - that's not the issue.
Like autodriving vehicles: I/O is not the issue.
it can only attack once every 2 or 3 seconds
So it needs to get about 10-15x faster to hold up against a "real" jedi.
Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed.
Dr. Bob obviously had one too many binge-drunks during his time at Quack Factory Diploma Mill and killed most of his brain cells.
...which is used for demonstration of the first robot. (See 1:36 in the video)
So they made a robotic arm move in a bunch of predetermined ways, then attached a stick at the end, and pretend to fight it with another stick...
Uh... Am I missing something?
This is not a good PR video for Stanford and I'd be embarrassed to put my name on it.
Maybe if they had a video camera watching the student's stick and striking motion and then moved the robot to counter attack in real time - then you've got something worth sharing.
This is nothing more than an example of why paying for College doesn't guarantee any sort of success in life. All they've accomplished here is playing with someone else's expensive stuff.
What a waste of time and resources. It's shit. That guys parents must be really disappointed.
Personally I'd beat him around the head with the remains of his shitbot.
I've got a bad feeling about this.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
This was not the girl-on-droid (specifically, phallic-tool-wielding droid) video I had anxiously anticipated. sigh
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
This is not the control response I would expect from a fighting robot . The response of the robot is incredibly slow.
I expected something like this.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qEotHQgUsg
I want to hear more about this robot that makes grilled hamburgers!
A Jedibot is an oxymoron, everyone knows droids aren't force sensitive.
I would be embarrassed, what a waste....
Maybe if they had a video camera watching the student's stick and striking motion and then moved the robot to counter attack in real time - then you've got something worth sharing.
They did do this.
Am I the only one that thinks it's really slow? It seems to me that both the robot, and the computing resources available at Stanford ought to not be the limiting factors here, so why is it moving so slowly?
Skip ahead to about 1:52 in the video. What's the programming language? Tell me that's not BASIC...
I, for one, would like to welcome our new JediBot overlord
How long until the code is ported over to Android?
$ unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep
It's not exactly uncommon knowledge that students like to binge drink and play in the labs after hours. Imagine if, in a moment of drunken stupidity, they were to
take on chiropractic as a career? shit, dawg, that would be devastating. Is that what happened to you?