This is extremely impressive, what a beautiful piece of work.
The smile on that lady's face says more than any number of facebook 'likes' or google +1's could ever do for me, that's a real and measurable quality of life improvement for a single person, this really makes a difference.
The engineering on that arm is pretty heavy duty, I wonder what it weighs and how fast it could move and what kind of safeguards are built in to avoid the operator injuring themselves due to glitches in the system. If you look at the way the arm moves it is actually quite comparable to the arm of a baby that moves an object to its mouth the first couple of times.
With one big difference, a baby may get it wrong but it is not strong enough to do too much damage, even if it pokes itself in the eye every now and then it is usually with very little force. This arm however looks engineered to be strong enough and fast enough that it could do real damage to the operator or its environment. If that's servo driven there has to be a whole slew of safety systems in case a driver decides to hook a motor to V+ or V- because of a blown FET.
In any real-world machinery situation where the machinery is under software control and has the capability of doing real harm (for instance: machine shops with CNC gear) there are normally countless interlock systems that you'd have to bypass before you could get yourself in contact with a piece of it moving under control of the computer. In this case the operator is extremely exposed and I cringed when the arm sped up towards her face with the bottle. I also found myself sort of 'willing the bottle' in the right direction, they way some movies will have you react to something on the screen. Hard to describe.
This is not a soft hand moving either, it looks like it is made of pretty strong aluminum and fairly heavy.
They're using a Kuka DLR lightweight arm. It's a rather high-end piece of equipment. It's strong enough to do a pull-up, fast enough to catch a ball, and every joint incorporates a six-axis force-torque sensor. It's definitely strong enough to do damage. Of course, that just means that Kuka loaded it up with safety systems. The FT sensors let it know exactly how much force it's applying, and if they read too high a value the brakes slam on. I've never worked with those arms before, but I'd bet that there's a similar system completely in hardware. You'll also notice that the operator's left hand and the entire back half of the room are never seen; there are at least two emergency stop buttons there, probably more, and one of them is wired directly the arm's power supply.
Really, though, all that engineering is of secondary interest. That look on her face is exactly why I got into robotics. And we've only been at it for 15 years; imagine what we'll be able to do in another 15.
The smile on that lady's face says more than any number of facebook 'likes' or google +1's could ever do for me, that's a real and measurable quality of life improvement for a single person, this really makes a difference.
The engineering on that arm is pretty heavy duty, I wonder what it weighs and how fast it could move and what kind of safeguards are built in to avoid the operator injuring themselves due to glitches in the system. If you look at the way the arm moves it is actually quite comparable to the arm of a baby that moves an object to its mouth the first couple of times.
With one big difference, a baby may get it wrong but it is not strong enough to do too much damage, even if it pokes itself in the eye every now and then it is usually with very little force. This arm however looks engineered to be strong enough and fast enough that it could do real damage to the operator or its environment. If that's servo driven there has to be a whole slew of safety systems in case a driver decides to hook a motor to V+ or V- because of a blown FET.
In any real-world machinery situation where the machinery is under software control and has the capability of doing real harm (for instance: machine shops with CNC gear) there are normally countless interlock systems that you'd have to bypass before you could get yourself in contact with a piece of it moving under control of the computer. In this case the operator is extremely exposed and I cringed when the arm sped up towards her face with the bottle. I also found myself sort of 'willing the bottle' in the right direction, they way some movies will have you react to something on the screen. Hard to describe.
This is not a soft hand moving either, it looks like it is made of pretty strong aluminum and fairly heavy.