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:
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."
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Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.