As it turns out, creating mechanical animals isn’t as easy as science fiction would have us believe. Engineering still has a ways to go before replacing naturebut don’t tell that to the internet. The techosphere always hypes up the newest robot prototype which can perform this function or that. And frankly, most leave me feeling underwhelmed. However, I was gleefully blown away by the video below. Here we see a set of autonomous flying quadrocopters pulling off complex aerial maneuvers as they play a simplified tennis match against both robot and human opponents.
These mechanized McEnroes come courtesy of the Swiss university, ETH Zurich’s Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control. The tennis bots are based on German aerial engineering firm Ascending Technologies’ Hummingbird quadrocopter, but have been fitted with mesh “tennis racquets.”
The bots are directed by a central computer fitted with an overhead camera that tracks the moving ball and quickly crunches the data through a physics algorithm before feeding aerial maneuvers.
The result is a flying robot that can speedily react to changes in the physical world, thus sustaining a volley with a human or robot counterpart, or even “juggle” a ball with its racquetan accomplishment many humans have trouble doing for a prolonged period.
The design isn’t perfect by any means. The video is likely the highlight reel of Wall-E Wimbledon. But this does represent a larger trend in the development of our robot friends. The coming decade will see robots become less robotic. If they are going to step out of lab and into society, robots will need the ability to react and adapt to the unpredictability and chaos of the real world where nothing works with precision. Kind of like a game of tennis.