Robotic arm!! designed to catch flying objects

London, May 12 (IANS) With its palm open,
this robot is completely motionless. A split
second later, it suddenly unwinds and catches
all sorts of flying objects thrown in its
direction - a tennis racket, a ball, a bottle and
so on.
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology in Lausanne have developed a
bionic arm that capable of reacting on the spot
and grasping objects with complex shapes and
trajectories in less than five-hundredths of a
second!
This arm measures about 1.5 metres long and
keeps an upright position.
It has three joints and a sophisticated hand
with four fingers.
"Increasingly present in our daily lives and
used to perform various tasks, robots will be
able to either catch or dodge complex objects
in full-motion," said Aude Billard, head of
Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory
(LASA) at EPFL.
Not only do we need machines able to react on
the spot, but also to predict the moving
object's dynamics and generate a movement in
the opposite direction, he added.
This robotic arm already has a very real
potential application in space.
It has been associated to the Clean- mE project
carried out by the Swiss Space Center at EPFL
that aims to develop technologies for the
recovery and disposal of space debris orbiting
around Earth.
Fitted on a satellite, the arm would have the
task of catching flying debris, whose dynamics
are only partially known, researchers noted.
To obtain the desired speed and adaptability,
LASA researchers were inspired by the way
humans themselves learn: by imitation and
trial and error.
The invention has been described in an article
published in the journal IEEE Transactions on
Robotics.

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