There’s no shortage of plans online for building a simple ping pong cannon that can fire balls at hundreds of miles per hour. But you’re probably not going to find the details of Purdue University Professor Mark French’s cannon, since his creation can accelerate a ping pong ball to 900 miles per hour, or just over Mach 1.2. More »
This isn’t the only robot that can kick your butt at ping pong. But unlike other ping pong playing ‘botsot, this one wasn’t programmed with its abilities. It has learned through experience. Robotics experts at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany created this robot arm that learns to adapt its game as it plays.
Much like the Borg, it assimilates knowledge and adapts. But there is no cube ship or sexy Seven of Nine model. This is just an arm. The team attached the robot arm to the ceiling and attached a camera to watch and analyze the game. They taught the arm to play ping pong by feeding it more and more difficult shots. The arm was soon generating its own shots thanks to it’s amassed knowledge.
That’s right. It learned. It wasn’t trained in advance… and it is armed with ping pong balls. We are all so dead. I can already see the little plastic bits sticking out of open wounds in human foreheads.
[via Geekosystem]
We like to tell ourselves that learning by doing is the best strategy for improving our skills, but we seldom apply that philosophy to our robots; with certain exceptions, they’re just supposed to know what to do from the start. Researchers at the Technical University of Darmstadt disagree and have developed algorithms proving that robot arms just need practice, practice, practice to learn complex activities. After some literal hand-holding with a human to understand the basics of a ping-pong swing, a TUD robot can gradually abstract those motions and return the ball in situations beyond the initial example. The technique is effective enough that the test arm took a mere hour of practice to successfully bounce back 88 percent of shots and compete with a human. That’s certainly better than most of us fared after our first game. If all goes well, the science could lead to robots of all kinds that need only a small foundation of code to accomplish a lot. Just hope that the inevitable struggle between humans and robots isn’t settled with a ping-pong match… it might end badly.
German robot arm learns ping-pong as it plays humans, might rival its masters originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Oct 2012 07:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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There are plenty of R/C flying toys on the market these days, but I don’t know of many that can actually launch projectiles. The iStrike Shuttle is a flying drone which can not only buzz around, but can drop ping pong balls.
While I wish it could drop hundreds of balls, a la Mr. Moose, it can only drop one at a time. But that’s one more than my AR.Drone can do. Dream Cheeky’s iStrikeShuttle features a built-in gyroscopic technology to help it keep stable and balanced in flight, and can be controlled by your iOS device using Bluetooth connectivity.
The guys at Dream Cheeky are extremely close to having a production version ready, and just need to raise some funds to get the project over the finish line. If you’re one of the first 200 to head over to Kickstarter to support the iStrike Shuttle, you can grab one for $85(USD), a significant discount off the $129.99 retail price. Assuming they can hit their $30,000 fundraising goal by Thanksgiving, you should have one in hand in time for Christmas.
When we last caught up with the Beijing Institute’s family of bots, their abilities extended to slow (but pretty) tai chi moves. Returning three years later, we see that they’re coming along nicely: BHR-4 is still going through the old graceful routines, but now he’s wearing a human face and fetching sportswear to look like one of his creators. The 140-pound android beats certain Japanese alternatives by having both a fully-actuated body and a face that can mimic emotions, like surprise and fear when someone tries to give it a decent hair cut. Meanwhile, brother BHR-5 doesn’t bother with appearances, but instead has graduated to playing ping-pong in the hope of one day taking on rivals from Zhejiang University. He uses high-speed image processing and 32 degrees of freedom to pull off rallies of up to 200 shots, and he’ll do his utmost to impress you in the video after the break.
[Image and video credit: CCTV-4]
Continue reading Chinese androids wear tracksuits, play sports, but not at the same time (video)
Chinese androids wear tracksuits, play sports, but not at the same time (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Jul 2012 04:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
This miniature Death Star is the ultimate power of the table tennis universe. That’s right, this Death Star was actually created by carving a ping pong ball.
It was created by a forum user named tatumaru5963. I’m not sure what went into to making it since Google Translate kinda sucks, but it does look pretty amazing. There are some images that show a few of the steps necessary to create this thing though and judging by those images, this must have taken quite a while.
This space station is about half the size of a pack of cigarettes. All I can say is that this guy has some serious knife skills to build this thing with such precision. It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it.
[via Geekologie]
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