Confirming our suspicions that roboticists basically just sit around and invent ways to play games with robots all day, here's a video from Torsten Kröger (the same guy who took us through the JediBot demonstration at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, go figure) detailing how he and a bunch of his friends built themselves a robot that plays Jenga back in 2005:
As with most, uh, "research" projects like this, there's supposedly some larger purpose to it. Something about the potential of multi-sensor integration in industrial manipulation. Or whatever. I don't buy it, of course, but we can certainly applaud the fact that the robot was able to make 29 moves in a row, which means that it added nearly ten solid layers of blocks to the top of the tower without knocking it over. Time to preemptively surrender, folks. Here's one more vid of the robot making a move:
[ Jenga Robot ]
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.