They play with a ball, catch it in flight and juggling with a stick. The robots Masatoshi Ishikawa and Takashi Komuro have mostly the shape of a hand with three fingers, complete with two cameras and their speed was amazing enough to make a jealous player ping-pong …

To watch this robot arm to bounce back as fast as a small ball or the hand tridactyle catch one in flight with a movement barely visible to the naked eye, it is understood that the slowness of robot dog Aibo, Sony is far. Born in 1999 and has a complex behavior, the animal mechanical disappointed by the speed of his movements, evoking those of a puny knight encased in armor too heavy.

The speed of the robots in the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory, Tokyo, is however, amazing. Over the past decade, teams led by Masatoshi Ishikawa and Takashi Komuro trying to get robots to rapid movements, or ultra-fast. Their demonstrations were also held our attention during the 2009 edition of Laval Virtual, the annual meetings of the virtual reality.

Within the different research topics, these engineers have worked with in mind the utmost speed possible to develop systems of image analysis, sensor, giving a sense of touch and mechanisms put in motion arms, fingers or hands.

By combining these three skills, the laboratory conducts system performance dramatically. For example, is it possible to realize an apparatus that can read an inscription on a golf ball in flight? Yes, say researchers who work within the Group Dynamic Image Control, and studying all kinds of equipment for making checks in time real lighting, camera movements and vision systems to track the movements faster.

Feats to make himself useful even sympathetic

By combining this kind of technique to a three-fingered hand can it, feel it touches, Japanese researchers have succeeded in making an extraordinary ball catcher. Provided to throw the object to it (because it lacks an arm), the hand grasps the projectile without dropping.

Another robot tridactyle, moving his fingers, turns a wand at a speed worthy of a circus. Another is specially trained to seize on a cylindrical object. It does but it seems inevitable. The many videos featured on the site laboratory worth a visit …

These achievements are not fun. Vision systems capable of seeing what the human eye can perceive may have applications in many fields, scientific or industrial. They can greatly improve notably the so-called man-machine interface, which occupies many researchers in robotics. We know for instance that the responsiveness is a key element of the relationship between a human and a robot. Man gets tired quickly, or gets angry if the machine just to react or move. But if you can play it with ping-pong …