Oh no. Somebody taught a robot how to swordfight. We’re doomed

By Drew Prindle Published April 13, 2015

Sword-fighting robot

We had a good run, people, but I’m afraid our reign as the dominant species on the planet will soon be drawing to a close. A group of scientists from Japan has succeeded in creating a robot that knows how to sword fight against humans. It’s only a matter of time now before they stage a revolt and overthrow us. Prepare to welcome your new robot overlords.

Designed by the meddling geniuses at Namiki Laboratory, the nameless robot is equipped with a high-speed stereo vision system and special software that allows it to see and interpret human movement. When a fleshy opponent moves in to attack, the robot instantaneously detects and analyzes his motion, and predicts the most likely trajectories of his sword based on that movement. The system then plans a defensive motion to block the attack, and moves its arm to intercept.

Recommended Videos

It’s still in the developmental stages, but preliminary test results suggest that the robot’s fencing algorithm is extremely effective. Just check out the short video up above. Compared to the sword fighting bots we’ve seen before, this one is considerably faster. And as if that wasn’t terrifying enough, it’s also mounted on on wheels. The bot doesn’t appear to be terribly mobile in the video, but after the next upgrade it’ll probably be able to chase you down and cut out your gizzard at a moment’s notice. Running won’t even be an option.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…

Emerging Tech

Meet the Xenobots: Living, biological machines that could revolutionize robotics

xenobot swarm after 24hrs

In 2020, a new lifeform arrived on Earth. More specifically, it arrived in a lab -- the Levin Laboratory at Tufts University in Massachusetts. As alien species go, these were no little green men or any other science-fiction cliché. They looked more like tiny black specks of fine sand moving slowly around in a Petri dish. And while they’re not alien in the extraterrestrial definition, they certainly are in the sense that they’re strange. These so-called "xenobots" are living, biological automatons that may just signal the future of robotics as we know it.

“These don't fit the classical definition of an organism because they can't reproduce -- although from a safety standpoint this [is] a feature and not a defect,” Douglas Blackiston, a senior scientist in the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, told Digital Trends. “They could be classified as an 'imperfect organism.' I think they do qualify as robots, however. Even though they are living, they are built from the ground up for a specific purpose. These aren't something that has ever, or could ever, exist in nature -- it's a human-made construction.”
Swarms of living robots
Let’s back up. Last year, researchers at Tufts created the world’s first tiny, living, self-powered robots. These xenobots have been designed to function in a swarm: Walking, swimming, pushing pellets, carrying payloads, and working together to “aggregate debris scattered along the surface of their dish into neat piles.” They’re able to survive for weeks without food and to heal themselves after lacerations. Oh, and they’re made out of bits of frog, reconfigured by an A.I.

Emerging Tech

This spherical, BB-8 style robot is built to explore lava caves on the moon

DAEDALUS Robot on the moon render

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” The quotation, apocryphally attributed to Confucius, appears in the email signature of Andreas Nuechter, a professor of robotics and telematics at Julius-Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg (JMU) in Germany.

Nuechter is leading a project to build a rolling robot he hopes will be used to explore a system of hidden lava caves on the moon. The spherical robot, which looks a bit like BB-8 from the new Star Wars movies, is called DAEDALUS, an acronym that stands for Descent And Exploration in Deep Autonomy of Lunar Underground Structures.

Emerging Tech

Smart dummies: How robotic tackling tech is transforming football practice

USA Football MVP Robotics

Robots frequently step into the breach to carry out jobs that humans once performed. But this isn't usually because humans have been banned from doing the job.

“Back in 2010, the head football coach at Dartmouth College decided to completely eliminate tackling for practice,” Ryan McManus, director of sales and marketing at a Vermont-based company called MVP Robotics, told Digital Trends. “It was relatively controversial at the time, since it's a pretty important skill that has to be practiced, especially at the Division 1 level. They were trying to figure out a safer way to simulate a game scenario, but no one knew exactly how to do it.”