World's Fastest Robot Versus the Wiimote 92
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."
That's nothing. See this high speed robot hand. (Score:5, Informative)
That's nothing. The Adept robot is in production. Here's what's working in the lab. [youtube.com] 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.
Re:So wait (Score:4, 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.