On the Gripping Hand

eek_the_kat writes "The Sensor Fusion Project at Ishikawa Hashimoto Laboratory has developed a high speed visual feedback system called SPE-256. It allows the robot to track fast randomly moving objects and grasp them (movies here). The applications seem endless! I have seen many robot mpegs as of late, many courtesy of /., but these have to be some of the coolest I have ever come across. A must see."

Please... Let's get it out of the way...

[Michael's a Jerk!]

No Wank Jokes please. You're not funny.

Real improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like a real improvement. It's hard to tell exactly from the movies, but I have the impression that they have improved the 'grasping process' considerably. I mean, putting the right amount of pressure, at the right angle at the right moment is very difficult at best and is closely related to vision. They developed their own vision system and validate it in a 'robotic environment'. A good piece of research that needs to be continued for sure!

Re:Is it real?

[ecarlson]

> But still... that handshake looked really fishy, esp. the 90 degree rotation....

To me it looks like the robot arm was programmed to go into handshake mode (rotate 90 degrees, and get ready to track up and down) when it sees the human hand moving up and down. It didn't look fishy at all.

Also, according to the block diagram, there is a second video camera, but I don't know if it was used to aid 3D object location.