{"id":4511,"date":"2012-12-12T08:58:51","date_gmt":"2012-12-11T22:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/?p=4511"},"modified":"2012-12-12T08:58:51","modified_gmt":"2012-12-11T22:58:51","slug":"another-sign-of-the-impending-robot-apocalypse-they-can-catch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/2012\/12\/12\/another-sign-of-the-impending-robot-apocalypse-they-can-catch\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Sign of the Impending Robot Apocalypse: They Can Catch."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For as long as I can remember I&#8217;ve been fascinated with animatronics. I can remember being at an exhibit or amusement park of some sort that had giant animatronic dinosaurs littered around the landscape and I was simply fascinated with how they had been created. Of course as I got older the wonder started to subside slightly, replaced with a glorious bit of teenage angst, but my trip to Disneyland 2 years ago rekindled that interest thanks to a visit to the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Enchanted_Tiki_Room\" target=\"_blank\">Enchanted Tiki Room<\/a>, an animatronics installation that&#8217;s over 4 decades old.<\/p>\n<p>Disney has a pretty big interest in robotics as symbolized by their liberal use around their amusement park. What I didn&#8217;t know was that they had their own research and development division that&#8217;s responsible for the majority of the robots on the park, most of which were custom designed and built by them. Some of the things they&#8217;ve created are really impressive like this robot that&#8217;s able to play catch (and juggle!) with human participants:<\/p>\n<iframe title=\"Playing Catch and Juggling with a Humanoid Robot\" width=\"668\" height=\"376\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/83eGcht7IiI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<p>The way they do it is very interesting and wasn&#8217;t what I was expecting. They use a Kinect like sensor, an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.asus.com\/Multimedia\/Motion_Sensor\/Xtion_PRO_LIVE\/\" target=\"_blank\">ASUS Xtion PRO Live<\/a>, as a motion tracker that can sense the ball&#8217;s position in real time. From that they use a couple well known mathematical principles to derive the trajectory and move the hand into position in order to catch it. Whilst it&#8217;s really only capable of catching balls thrown in a parabolic arc (this is an assumption based on the way they&#8217;ve got it operating, but I could be wrong) it&#8217;s still pretty darn good at it. Even better is when they speed it up which makes it able to juggle with a human player. It&#8217;d be pretty fun to get 2 of them together just to see how long they&#8217;d go before one of them dropped a ball.<\/p>\n<p>Disneyland already had some pretty intriguing displays of robotics and this looks like it&#8217;ll be a pretty cool addition to their already impressive collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For as long as I can remember I&#8217;ve been fascinated with animatronics. I can remember being at an exhibit or amusement park of some sort&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[4054,3979,4055,4058,1691,4057,4053,4056,4059],"class_list":["post-4511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-tech","tag-animatronics","tag-asus","tag-catch","tag-computer-vision","tag-disney","tag-juggle","tag-robotics","tag-throw","tag-xtrion-pro-live"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppBqt-1aL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}