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Once you've developed robots that can feed on human flesh, the next obvious step is to teach it to juggle. This amazing robot can juggle a ping-pong ball and, very briefly, two. Moreover, it accomplishes this feat without any external sensors. The robot can't see or hear the ball. Rather, it calculates where the ball will land:
How does the robot do this? The key elements are the shape of the paddle and how the robot strikes the ball. We used mathematical analysis to learn which shape and motion would make "sensorless" juggling possible. What we found was that a slightly concave paddle keeps the ball on the plate and that a decelerating motion keeps the ball in the air.
You can read technical details about this project, dubbed "The Blind Juggler", at the link.
Link via Geekologie