Wiimote Controlled Murder Robot

January 25, 2007 3:41 PM

Wiimote Controlled Murder Robot At first, I was sure this was fake, and one of these guys was going to die horribly. But now I'm not sure. If this isn't fake, it's coooooool. (via Gizmodo)
posted by gummo (27 comments total)

If this is real these men deserve a Nobel Price (not for peace).
posted by nathancaswell at 3:47 PM on January 25, 2007

holy crap
posted by Jikido at 3:48 PM on January 25, 2007

This strikes me as an astonishingly bad idea.

And yet, I want one.

Thus we see the dichotomy that is my life.
posted by quin at 3:57 PM on January 25, 2007

"Wii made you! WII MADE YOU!"
posted by mr_crash_davis at 3:59 PM on January 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

If it swings that sword like it picks up the hook in my Wii bowling throw, I won't be responsible for the resulting carnage.
posted by ninjew at 4:00 PM on January 25, 2007

Thanks, but I'll wait for the chainsaw-toting version.
posted by Smart Dalek at 4:08 PM on January 25, 2007

BUILD ME AN ARMY WORTHY OR MORDOR.
posted by fidgets at 4:43 PM on January 25, 2007

oh noes. OF. OF MORDOR.
posted by fidgets at 4:43 PM on January 25, 2007

I propose an amendment to Asimov's First Law of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm -- unless it would be totally frickin' AWESOME!
posted by Guy Smiley at 4:50 PM on January 25, 2007

If they made one of these, they could make two; if they'd made two, they could have fought each other; if they'd fought each other and recorded it, they could have avoided disappointing me.

Mostly kidding. Cool (and awful) idea, thanks for posting.
posted by sleevener at 4:56 PM on January 25, 2007

They should put that on one of these.
posted by empath at 5:02 PM on January 25, 2007

This strikes me as an astonishingly bad fucking awesome idea.

And yet, I want one.

Fixed that for you :D
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 5:13 PM on January 25, 2007

They need to mount that fucker on a caterpillar tread and turn it loose.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 5:17 PM on January 25, 2007

Big deal. Did you ever hear Kevin Kline tell of that fish he once caught?
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 5:24 PM on January 25, 2007

who's the whiny bitch who complained about getting hit with a tennis ball

GAH I hate nerds like that

the device is cool!
posted by evilelvis at 5:32 PM on January 25, 2007

That is awesome, and almost certainly real. They should do a little work on their latency problem though..
posted by Chuckles at 6:25 PM on January 25, 2007

This is what I had in mind when I begged my dad to get me a Radio Shack robot arm kit in 1981.

Smart dad.
posted by dhartung at 6:55 PM on January 25, 2007

I was just thinking about the old Radio Shack Armatron, dhartung! That thing rocked.

I like the broadsword idea. These gentlemen need a grant.
posted by Kikkoman at 9:58 PM on January 25, 2007

I WAS PROMISED CRAP-SMASHING. I DON'T SEE ANY SMASHING. SMASH THE WHINY BITCH! AGAIN! AGAIN!
posted by loquacious at 10:24 PM on January 25, 2007

Sure loq, you say that now. But when you wake up and find an industrial arm robot at the foot of your bed with a broad sword, (after a long day at work where the boss was totally riding it's hydraulics ass, do you really want smashing? No. You want it to tell you about it's day, drink some lubricant white-zin, and just let it unwind.

Or un-spool. Or whatever.

Thing is, it has a broadsword, and the Wii guys were showing it how to use it, so it's better not to piss it off.
posted by quin at 10:36 PM on January 25, 2007

me: Hey Armatron, lets pick up that little thing over there.

armatron: Sure! rrrrrrrrrr click click click click click click...

me: sigh.
posted by pkingdesign at 11:38 PM on January 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'm with loq. MORE SMASHING!




needs a redux. or stabbing.
posted by craven_morhead at 6:48 AM on January 26, 2007

is it just me or are the robot motions pre-programmed and just responding to triggers caused by particular wii-movements. In other words.. it seems like it is not tracking their movements, and they could have just as easily triggered it with a button press.
posted by empath at 6:50 AM on January 26, 2007

Now if they can just hook it up with an iKill somehow ... everyone wins!
posted by cadge at 7:05 AM on January 26, 2007

empath hits the nail on the head, I think. It looks like the reason for the latency is that they're doing some sort of pattern matching in software between the motions they make with the remote and preprogrammed motions. Though, the Wii seems to have pretty low latency on motion detection - I'm not sure why theirs is so much slower. They make it look good by having a wider variety of motions than in most Wii games I've tried, but it's still just pattern matching.

I can see why they did it that way, though. I think robots like that require preset movement patterns (eg you feed them a path that's usually generated from some mildly fancy math to figure out how to get from point a to point b in 3d with a particular arm configuration), and don't have an interface where you can set the tool's acceleration, or velocity in 3d. They might have a go to position mode built in, but doing that 50 times a second would probably not look nearly as good because it'd be noisy and choppy, especially since the Wiimotes just sense acceleration, so you'd be double-integrating noisy data and the system would drift like crazy.
posted by heresiarch at 9:31 AM on January 26, 2007

I can see why they did it that way, though. I think robots like that require preset movement patterns

Which is a possible explanation for the latency. The movement has to be complete, captured, parametrized, programmed into the arm, and only then can it be repeated.

I guess you've got to figure out what "real" should be, in this particular context, before you can say whether it is or not :P
posted by Chuckles at 11:35 AM on January 26, 2007

Highly relevant to my interests.
posted by sleeplessunderwater at 1:14 AM on January 27, 2007