If you’re afraid of a future robot uprising, the video above is not for you.
In the 8-second clip, a robot and human engage in a sword fight. Although short, the robot certainly shows off some skills.
The robot was built by Japan’s Namiki Laboratory. Here’s what it says about the sword-fighting robot that’s controlled by high-speed vision:
“… We propose a sword-fighting robot system controlled by a stereo high-speed vision system as an example of human-robot dynamic interaction systems. The developed robot system recognizes both of the positions of a human player and that of the sword grasped by the robot hand. And it detects the moment when the human starts to move by using ChangeFinder which is a method of detecting the turning points.
“Next it predicts the possible trajectories of the sword of the human player by a least-squares method from the moment when the attack started. Finally it judges the kinds of the attack and generates an appropriate defensive motion. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.”
Thank goodness the swords were made of foam.