"Look Mom, I can juggle five at a time!"

We all know robots and supercomputers are smart. They can beat us at chess, Jeopardy!, calculating pi to an ungodly number of digits. But one robot is thumbing its servo at its brainiac brethren and says, “Sure, but can you juggle?”

At AMPER 2011 (International Trade Fair of Electrotechnics, Electronics, Automation and Communication Technology) in Brno, Czech republic, 580 companies from 24 countries displayed their latest and greatest. We came across a pretty cool demonstration from the show that you can see in the videos below. The juggling robot is essentially two mechanical arms attached to carriages that slide up and down vertical tracks. Smaller servomotors mounted on the carriages move the arms horizontally. Placed in front of the juggler is a high-speed camera that tracks the movement of the balls and Kalman filter mathematics are used to predict the catching point of the ball. The robot gets 5 balls in the air at the same time, which is pretty impressive. But as you’ll see in the videos, it’s not perfect.

The robot is the masters thesis project of two students at the Czech Technical University in Prague. Rather than building a really cool carnival game, the project is aimed at creating a tool for distance learning of motion control technologies. The camera uses TCP/IP communication to relay its visual feedback. The builders plan to enable distant access by TCP/IP so that students and people from industry can work at optimizing the technology by improving the original prediction algorithm of the Kalman filter.

Actually, now that I think of it, I can picture a juggler being part of one of those Rube Goldberg-like ball contraptions you see at science museums and airports. But then, if you hope to predict where those balls land you’re probably going to need one of the brainiac robots to do your Kalman filter math for you.

[video credits: ServoJuggler via YouTube]
video 1: Juggler1
video 2: Juggler2