. 1.5m long arm shown catching everything from a tennis racket to a bottle
. Can learn to catch objects of any shape and size
By Mark Prigg
It could be the ultimate baseball-playing machine, never dropping a catch.
Researchers today revealed a robot arm capable of reacting on the spot and grasping objects with complex shapes and trajectories in less than five-hundredths of a second.
The 1.5m arm has been shown catching everything from a tennis racket to a bottle.
Researcher from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne revealed the robo-arm in an article published today by IEEE transactions on robotics, the first journal in the field.
The arm measures about 1.5 meters long and keeps an upright position, has three joints and a sophisticated hand with four fingers.
HOW TO TEACH A ROBOT TO CATCH
To obtain the desired speed and adaptability, researchers were inspired by the way humans themselves learn: by imitation and trial and error.
This technique, called Programming by demonstration, does not give specific directions to the robot. Instead, it shows examples of possible trajectories to it.
It consists in manually guiding the arm to the projected target and repeating this exercise several times.
The research was conducted with a ball, an empty bottle, a half full bottle, a hammer and a tennis racket…
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