Awesomely Bad Ideas: Teaching a Robot to Sword Fight

Georgia Tech has given a robot a sword and told it that humans are out to get it, all in the name of safety

2 min read

Awesomely Bad Ideas: Teaching a Robot to Sword Fight

In a paper presented this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), in Shanghai, Georgia Tech researcher Tobias Kunz starts thusly: "In order to deploy safe and flexible robots for service and automation, robots must act safely in close contact with humans." Accompanying this innocuous first sentence is this picture:

human robot sword fight

You're probably wondering, at this point, just what the heck a robot with a sword has to do with safety of all things. And why do people keep giving swords to robots anyway? There was Hubo II dancing with one last year, and just three days ago we saw two industrial manipulators dueling with lightsabers.

As it turns out, Kunz says that one good way to get a robot to be dynamically safe around humans is to just program it to think of humans as adversaries. Huh? You may still be wondering why giving a robot a sword and teaching it to think of humans as bad guys is somehow a good thing, but bear with me.

On a fundamental level, a lot of what sword fighting is about is predicting the intentions of a human and then deciding how to respond. By teaching a robot to defensively (just defensively, mind you) block incoming sword attacks, the idea is to create a general model that robots can use to react quickly and safely around the unpredictable movements of nearby humans.

Plus, come on, it's just awesome. Here's a simulation of the work in progress:

So far, the sword fighting is only taking place in a computer, but as you can see from the pic, Georgia Tech does apparently have a real robot that's capable of wielding a real(ish) sword. Letting this thing loose against a pack of real-life ninjas is clearly the next logical step.

Kunz did the work with colleagues Peter Kingston, Mike Stilman, and Magnus Egerstedt, and their ICRA paper was titled, "Dynamic Chess: Strategic Planning for Robot Motion."

READ ALSO:

Treebot Learns to Autonomously Climb Trees
Wed, May 18, 2011

Blog Post: Not even trees can save you from this inchworm-inspired climbing robot

How Robots Can Learn From Your Pathetic Failures
Wed, May 18, 2011

Blog Post: Getting a robot to do what you want is never an easy task, especially if you can't even do the task yourself

Lingodroid Robots Invent Their Own Spoken Language
Tue, May 17, 2011

Blog Post: These little robots make up their own words to tell each other where they are and where they want to go

Dodge Shouldn't Be Scared of Robot Cars
Thu, May 05, 2011

Blog Post: Dodge thinks that a future full of autonomous cars is going to make driving boring, but they're wrong

The Conversation (0)