This Sword Fighting Robot Could Be The Start Of The End Of Humanity

There are all sorts of robots in use at the moment, like robots that can help assemble cars and other electronic equipment. We also have robots that can help perform search and rescue operations, and now over in Japan, scientists at the Tokyo University’s Namiki Lab have created a robot that has the ability to sword fight with humans.

Now before you start getting worried about sword-wielding robots kicking down your door and eradicting/enslaving the rest of humanity, this is a project that is actually pretty cool. According to the team who describes how the robot works, “[The robot] detects the moment the human starts to move. It predicts the possible trajectories of the sword of the human player from the moment when the attack starts, and finally judges the kind of attack and generates an appropriate defensive motion.”

So thankfully it looks like it is merely defending itself at the moment. It also seems to be pretty spot on when it is defending itself as you can see in the short video above, although we have to admit we’re curious as to how it might perform when faced with faster or more complex attacks.

The robot will rely on a two-camera high-speed vision system and a two-step algorithm to help defend itself, along with a mathematical method that helps predict the most likely movement of its attacker.

That being said, this isn’t the first sword-wielding robot we’ve seen. Previously students at the Stanford University created a lightsaber-wielding robot, although that particular robot relied on a Kinect to “see” the attacker, but in this case the process has been streamlined. Pretty awesome, huh?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Robots
Tags: Science