So now I’m thinking that maybe the world IS coming to an end. First the robots came for our jobs. Then the robots came for our genitals. And now, the robots are coming for our Ren faires. When will the madness stop? It won’t stop. Not until the robots are writing hyperbolic blog posts like this one. Gulp.

WOW. And… oh, fuck.
Via.

18 replies on “Invasion of the Robot Jugglers”

  2. It’s cool, except that once you’ve made a robot to do a thing, making it do the same thing over and over again is simple. So once this thing could do the movements to make the balls go that way, it could just do it forever, since there are no variables. I’ll be scared when it can juggle with balls that look the same but have different weights, with a human throwing the balls in, and maybe someone shooting a machine gun at it. Especially the machine gun.

  6. GENIUSES of the Stranger attempt to invent such a thing. ALL HAIL THE CRITIC!
    Vince, you, like me, are POINTLESS. GET IT!?

    GENIUSES of the Stranger attempt to invent such a thing. ALL HAIL THE CRITIC!
    Vince, you, like me, are POINTLESS. GET IT!?

    GENIUSES of the Stranger attempt to invent such a thing. ALL HAIL THE CRITIC!
    Vince, you, like me, are POINTLESS. GET IT!?

  14. One of the Showcase items for SCAV was to build a juggling robot.

    183. The dark side of the gleaming steel and bright lights of modern robotics is unemployment among laborers. Automobile assembly, heavy manufacturing, and even book retrieval in the library have been taken over by tireless, many-armed machines. And now, even the jugglers are being pushed out of work by their robotic counterparts. Build an automaton that juggles by tossing or bouncing at least two objects. Automata will be evaluated for their ability to continuously juggle multiple objects in a complex pattern. [250 points]

    Ours didn’t really work, let alone look like that motherfucking bad-ass jugglebot.

  16. Have you never read a Muedede post? He could be convincingly replaced with a bigram Markov chainer in about 30 minutes.

  17. They came for our genitals, and I didn’t know? OOoo no. I like ’em tall, well lit, and with ambidextrously articulated servos.

  18. @2

    Nice to have your expert opinion on control theory, Kalman filters, computer vision, and optimization/dynamic programming.

    You apparently also know where to buy servos with perfect response curves and zero margin-of-error. Otherwise this thing might have to do something fancy when it messes up a throw due to imperfect components that don’t always respond in the same way for the same inputs.

    Like, say, determining where a ball is in its field of vision, tracking it, guessing where it actually is (because of the lag from the network connections), planning a route to catch it within the restrictions of the other moving objects, and then throwing it in the most efficient way possible.

    And they did it with zero variables!

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