oh oh that's awesome
so you guys we are here at the hofu institute at uestc
to check out not just the life-size yao
ming free throw robot but also
the one and only badminton playing robot
i'm gonna uh see if my skills are up to snuff here in just a moment we're gonna
get briefed on exactly how this thing was built over the last several years
and see if man is obsolete just yet
or if we've still got some time left
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so we haven't been briefed yet on how exactly it works but it seems to have
something to do with these stereo cameras in these base stations at the end of the
court cool so this robot is not being used right
now because there's a lineup of people that want to use it but i think i should
be up now everyone's kind of leaving okay
you like this yeah should be good okay we can pray
oh sure all right i guess i'm getting a warm-up
match
okay so we're getting a private demo now and we're starting with them showing us
the two robots playing against each other completely robotic badminton game
okay so here's how the base station works i was right these two cameras here
are for stereo computer vision and i was actually wrong about some
other aspects of it so for example i had thought that these right here might be
ultrasonic sensors that aided these cameras in some way but no that's not
the case at all so they're using two baumer cameras they're 2048 by 2048
resolution and they run at 180 frames per second
so according to the guys here they manage as little as 10
milliseconds of delay between the shuttle starting to move
towards one of the robots and it predicting
approximately where it's going to land on the court so here's how the game
starts right now it's very much in prototype
stages but the plan is actually to turn these into a commercial product and you
can actually buy one today if you want
at the value price of just about 65 000
us dollars for the whole system so that's the robot itself which runs for
about 30 to 60 minutes on battery the base station with the cameras that's
powered by it's either a core i5 or a core i7 computer they weren't 100 sure
and uh i don't know maybe they throw in a racket for you at the same time that one
i'm not 100 on
so at this point the robots aren't really aiming at
anything specific they're just trying to schwack the bird
kind of that away and then it's up to the other robot to get in the right spot
so they haven't actually measured the top speed that the robot can travel on
the court but from just watching them you can see
especially in a case where one of them mishits
they can actually get to where they need to go really fast
so they've got treads on the bottom that allow the entire robot to move on the
court and then the racket itself and the
servo that's mounted to it can also travel in both x and y axes like uh a
cnc as you can see ever since that first
glitch they've actually been rallying with each other continuously
and it's finally over you can see it really went for it there though okay
okay it's my turn to play
oh nice
so you can see the robot returns to center every time
that puts it in the best position to make the next shot although i
shouldn't say that the robot does it so much as the control tower does it
so the robot itself actually doesn't have any sensors at all
and it relies on the cameras to get around on the court
so they need to use like a tracker pad at the beginning of
the setup process in order to help measure the court as a calibration
process now in the future the plan is to continue to develop it
maybe give it the ability to block a smash
or give it the ability to watch the player and use ai to predictively decide
what shot it expects him to play
and then get ready for it proactively
look at it go all right let's make it really move
nice see that
i hit the ceiling but the robot still moved to a location and made a swing
that's because what it does is it actually predicts based on the first 10
milliseconds of the shuttle's movement where it's going to go and then does its
best to update with more granularity as
the shuttle continues to fly but it will still take that initial data
move to where it thinks it's going to go and then use a countdown timer
calculation to make a swing when it thinks it's going to arrive so watch i'm
going to try and do that again as long as i'm not smashing too hard it
can actually play back some of my downward shots
but it'll have to wait until the racket's angle can be adjusted before it
can do so with more consistency now the original model that they used
to win the robotics contest back in i think it was 2015 or 2016 when
the initial design was made had two rackets one that hit this way and one
that hit vertically but what they found as they continued to refine the design
was that it really just didn't make that much of a difference at this level
so according to the students here
the condition of the shuttle shouldn't make that much of a difference
because of the way that they're calculating its likely trajectory
but i did notice the one that i was using just now it missed twice within a
span of about 30 seconds so
oh not bad oh
wow it actually won a point on me there your turn
okay hold on i gotta ah gotta do this up
shut up i showered this morning no i showed up that doesn't change that the
easy rig is sweaty you know how to use it oh man that sucks
what the heck
i can't figure out how to get you in focus
did you hit it out again robot's gonna kick your ass dennis
dude what this is like nerd sports all
over again so
we're not at the point yet where all humans
can be bested by robots
but at least some of them can
and so i for one am gonna prepare myself
to welcome our robot overlords and now a word from our sponsor
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get back to my game