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.

Comments

Re:This is only a toy

[gclef]

In its defence, this is exactly what the movie jedi did also, so calling it a "jedi bot" is an accurate description.

Re:This is only a toy

[diewlasing]

I'm not sure if you're joking or you really did miss the point of the experiment. Yes, obviously a more realistic robot would try to actually attack the sword. But this isn't the main point. The point is to see if you can actually engineer a robot to respond to different situation appropriately. And they did. I have a have a ladder that goes great with that high horse of yours.

Re:Laws of Robotics

[TheRaven64]

Why not? Pretty much every robot produced can violate the first law, because no one has created a control system capable of defining what 'harm' means. Even toy robots can move just outside of a baby's reach and make them cry. Most factory robots could probably disassemble a human if one got in the way.

Most of Asimov's robot stories dealt with the fact that 'harm' is difficult to quantify even for highly intelligent beings. For something with a simple control program, it's basically impossible.