Gadgetory

oh that's awesome so you guys we are here at the hoof who Institute at uni STC to check out not just the life-sized downing freethrow robot but also the one and only badminton playing robot I'm gonna 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in just a moment we're gonna get briefed on exactly how this thing was built over the last several years and see if man is obsolete just yet or if we've still got some time left thanks to video blocks for sponsoring this episode they're a great subscription-based resource for downloading stock footage video and more stay tuned for an awesome offer from them later on in the video 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 everyone's kind of leaving okay yeah should be good oh sure alright 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 a hundred and eighty frames per second so according to the guys here they manage as little as ten milliseconds of delay between the shuttle starting to move towards one of the robots and it predicting approximately where it's gonna land on the court so here's how the gaming 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 sixty five thousand US dollars for the whole system so that's the robot itself which runs for about 30 to 60 minutes on battery the Bay station with the cameras that's powered by it's either a Core i5 or a core i7 computer they weren't a hundred percent sure and I don't know maybe they throw in a racket for you at the same time that one I'm not a hundred percent on so at this point the robots aren't really aiming at anything specific they're just trying to swak 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 miss hits 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 port and then the racket itself and the servo that's mounted to it can also travel in both x and y axes like a CNC as you can see ever since that first glitch they've actually been rallying with each other continuously oh-ho 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 them 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 robots 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 shuttles 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 gonna go and then use a countdown timer calculation to make a swing when it thinks it's going to arrive so watch I'm gonna 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 Rockets 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 racquets 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 it's 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 want to point on you there your turn okay hold on I got a Oh gonna do this up shall I shower this morning not showing us that doesn't change that the easy rig is sweaty this sucks what the heck I can't figure out how to get you in focus did you hit it out again robots 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 I'm gonna prepare myself to welcome our robot overlords and now a word from our sponsor have you ever just really needed a quick video clip for b-roll and After Effects template 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consider checking out where to buy the stuff we features you can actually buy it at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like not this one I'm just reppin my buddy Jason from Drive badminton today but we have LT t-shirts down there and also link down there as our community forum which you should totally join now I'm gonna get back to my game