What can’t robots do these days? As the the engineering society IEEE’s robotics page shows, there’s a robot for everything these days, so why not a robot to play ping pong?
Researchers at China’s Zhejiang University in Hangzhou recently unveiled a pair of ping-pong playing robots called “Wu” and “Kong” and their special skill is rallying between themselves and humans, as shown in the video below.
The two robots are 5.25 feet and 121 pounds and can be seen in the segment placidly hitting the ping pong ball back and forth to each other.
The researchers use cameras that capture 120 images a second and the robots use those images to calculate the ball’s position, speed and angle, according to Xinhua News, China’s official news agency.
The story doesn’t provide much more detail on how the robots achieve their calculations, but according to the researchers their moves are for now pretty basic.
“The robots are not yet able to use complicated techniques like curving, shanking, or slicing,” according to the story.
Nevertheless, the researchers have ambitiously named the robots “Wu,” and “Kong,” after Sun Wukong, the monkey with super-powers from the 400 plus-year-old Chinese epic novel Journey to the West.
They’re not the first robots to play ping pong. Topio (Tosy Ping Pong Playing Robot,) made its debut in 2005 at the Tokyo International Robot Exhibition. The robot was created by the Vietnamese industrial robot company Tosy, and the stated goal was to create a robot that could “eventually” beat a professional ping pong player. There’s no word on what kind of progress it’s made. The company also makes a robot called Topio Dio that apparently can serve you drinks.
While it all sound like fun and games, industry around the world increasingly relies on robots to create products. The bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra, for example, used robots that whistled Disney tunes to alert their human counterparts of their presence.
And robots, believe it or not, are replacing factory workers in China. The Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, plans on “employing” 1 million robots by 2013, according the Economist.
