"I let the brewed coffee Oil Master's brain"
Scene missing! A video in this post has disappeared. If you know of an accessible version of this video, please mail me so that I can update this post.
Tags: mpegs, robots, scene missing
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11 Responses:
You are the veritable masters of making things cute and exceedingly disturbing at the same time. I salute you.
And fear you.
It's Sumomo!!!!
Back in the Sixties Unimate built BIG robots, hydraulically powered machines the size (and power) of a backhoe to do spot-welding on car bodies, that sort of thing. At an industrial exhibition they put one of these monsters in a booth making cups of coffee for the attendees. The cycle involved grasping a coffee pot from a bolted-down hotplate, splashing some boiling-hot coffee in the vague direction of the cup sitting in a mount to keep it accurately positioned, then it would get a bottle of milk from a fridge fixed firmly to the floor and splash some of that into the cup. All of the location stuff was due to the lack of any external sensors on the robot; it was simply going through a sequence of steps in three-dimensional space while opening and closing its gripper.
The robot worked perfectly, the coffee was crap. Sadly the door handle on the fridge couldn't take the strain and finally gave way. The robot grasped the door handle and pulled. The fridge door stayed shut, the handle came away in the gripper. The robot released the handle and reached into the fridge to get the bottle of milk. Did I mention this thing has about as much power as a backhoe? It got the milk bottle. When it swung back towards the audience it was wearing the fridge door like a bangle while frasping some shards of glass. At that point the booth bunnies running the demo managed to get to the Big Red Mushroom switch before it launched the door into the crowd and killed potential customers.
That is quite, quite awesome.
As is the video.
I'm surprised they didn't put interlocks on the bottom of the fridge just in case the robot knocked it over.
The fridge was bolted to the floor to keep it in registration with the robot as was all the other stuff in the exhibit (the table, the hotplate etc.) In fact it was a dummy fridge with the back removed so a booth bunny could keep replacing the milk bottle with a filled one. Rigged demo, anyone?
This is a fantastic story that is useless without video.
I dare say I'd pay an internet dollar for footage of this event.
Put down the cup of coffee. You have 20 seconds to comply.
That is pretty damn creepy.
Surely one of your readers must be Japanese-obsessed to be able to read the creator's page and tell us if any of this is dynamic, or if it just took a lot of takes to get the timing and positioning correct.
The arm relaxation after the meatbag takes the cup, for example, doesn't have much margin for error. On the other hand, some of the other videos show a similar 'bot being controlled by joysticks, so perhaps it's all macros under operator control?