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hill
high fiber member
Yes, the redundancies are nearly as great as the folks that keep answering this same question.
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hill
high fiber member
as a side note - check out those KUKA robots trying to beat the #1 ping ponger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIIJME8-au8
Now that's a tangent ... AND a killer program
[emoji12]
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIIJME8-au8
Now that's a tangent ... AND a killer program
[emoji12]
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hockeythug
Active Member
hill
high fiber member
hockeythug
Active Member
keeping in mind that the video is of course an advertisement for that robotics company -- and Kuka makes incredibly sophisticated robots -- I do not find it credible that the robot shown can track the ping pong ball and respond that rapidly with a precision strike to send the ball back across the table and keep it in play multiple times in a row.
Factory robots can perform spatially complex movements rapidly and repeatedly with extreme accuracy. That is nothing like playing ping pong even at the simplest level.
It's a two part* problem.
Part 1: The robot arm has to have the speed, position sensors, and repeatability to get the paddle into a known position.
Part 2: Determine the trajectory of the ball in order to know where the correct position for part 1 will be.
KUKA has obviously solved part 1 pretty well.
Part 2 comes with some pretty sophisticated sensors and computing power that's not normally part of an industrial setup (as it isn't needed). But seems to me, part 2 is additional computing power and some vision or RADAR or both. Once the equations are solved for knowing where the ball will be at a given time, it's a simple** matter to command the arm to move to the correct position to return the ball.
Also of interest is that the human player quickly figured out the robot's limitations and won the match. The robot cannot win if it cannot reach every possible position (near the net, cannot backup to get an overhead smash), so it lost.
*Well, probably way more than that, but let's simplify it!
**Simple to someone else, not me!
Joules Verne
Member
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
JimVandegriff
Member
hill
high fiber member
KenN
Member
Yes. I've worked as an automation engineer for a little over 25 years, and I've settled on describing my job as "imagining everything that could possibly go wrong with a process, and making sure that there are sensors and programs in place to detect and respond to them."
