Researchers from the Learning Algorithms and System Laboratory (LASA) at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed a robotic arm that can catch objects.
The hand has four fingers and is able to catch a variety of items, including a half-full water bottle and a tennis racket, Mashable reported.
"I think the main novelty we bring to object-catching is the way we transfer information from a human to the robot," said Ashwini Shukla, researcher at LASA.
The arm is able to make adjustments in as few as five-hundredths of a second to catch objects. It measures close to 1.5 meters long, and uses cameras to "watch" the objects coming at it and then makes the moves needed to catch them. Other objects caught included a ball and a hammer, CNET reported.
"Today's machines are often pre-programmed and cannot quickly assimilate data changes," said Aude Billard, head of LASA. "Consequently, their only choice is to recalculate the trajectories, which requires too much time from them in situations in which every fraction of a second can be decisive."
The arm is the result of researchers' combining a lightweight robot arm (LBR) from the German company KUKA with an Allegro Hand from SimLab, Mashable reported.
A process called "programming by demonstration" was used to train the robot to catch different items. In this process, the researchers attached the hand to the arm, which can be trained by movement, then physically guided the arm through the motion of catching objects, which cameras stationed nearby captured throughout the process. As a result, the arm was able to build a model of an object flying through the air, then used the model to catch the items by itself.
"Training requires about 20 examples for each type of object," Billard said. "Writing the code - or rather, developing the algorithm - is the result of two to three years of work of the two main characters, Dr. Seung Su Kim and Ashwini Shukla."
Billard added that the research team is looking to have the robotic arm eventually used to protect humans when they are in danger, CNET reported. Situations in which they believe the arm cold be useful include catching people when they fall and grabbing objects that are about to land on them.
