Robot Jugglers Are Cooler Than Creepy Clowns

Robots can do all sorts of things today that are very impressive. I am partial to the video of the industrial robots I posted up last month that showed the bots having a lightsaber duel. I can have a fake lightsaber battle, but I can't juggle at all. A couple juggling robots have turned up on video and they are really cool and take completely different tracks to juggle the balls.

The first video of of a robot that can juggle five balls at one time. The bot was made by three master's students from Czech Technical University in Prague. It has three linear motors inside with one for each arm and the third for the central ball deployment system. The hands of the bot move up and down quite nosily and juggle the balls like a pro. The bot uses a feedback loop and a high-speed camera to fine tune the trajectories of the balls so they can be caught.

The other juggling bot is different in that it uses no cameras and has a pendulum design. It does no sensing of the ball location as it swings back and forth. I don't think you can really call it juggling since this bot only uses one ball.

[via Spectrum]