Juggling is hard to do when you’re a robot. Catching and throwing a falling object is tricky for a lot of humans, let alone a machine that has to formulate a plan for catching and then execute it. This robot, though, just whacks the balls and lets them fly.
Robots have actually been juggling for a while, but this robot, the Circular Cloverleaf, is designed to do it as simply as possible. There are no sensors, no scanners, no way to measure the pressure or see a ball going astray. It just has four balls of the same weight and shape that it hits with the same force, giving them the same spin and trajectory, every time. It almost seems fake at first, but if you pay attention, the robot drops a ball at first, and as it keeps juggling, the pattern can drift around.
So, why build it? It’s part of the Blind Juggler series of robots, and it’s essentially research by roboticists into incorporate robots into the everyday chaos that’s human life, also known as “dynamic systems.” Essentially, they’re laying the groundwork for a robot to have a form of muscle memory; instead of “seeing” an object, having to form a plan, and then execute that plan, the robot can just act. It will also help robots compensate for the unknown in dangerous situations, and to understand how something might go “off-script,” as it were.
But for now, it’s just used to make somewhat eerie juggling robots. As long as the robots don’t become clowns, though, we’re cool. Terminators we can handle, but Terminators that are also clowns is just too much.
(Via Gizmodo and blindjuggler.org)