The only thing more exciting than watching the world’s fastest robot is trying to defeat the world’s fastest robot with your video game skills. Adept’s Quattro, a placement and sorting arm, took the title of fastest robot last year, but it was only recently during National Robotics Week that it met its most gruesome opponents: nerds with Wiimotes. Visitors tried to keep the Quattro from placing and sorting on a small mechanized platform by moving it using the Nintendo video controller. This wasn’t even a close competition. Check out the Quattro’s insultingly easy defeat over the Wiimote guided platform as it dodges and weaves in the video from BotJunkie below:
There’s a good reason automation is spreading to every aspect of manufacturing. Robots like the Quattro are simply too fast and too precise for humans to contend with. Sure, the competition in the video above would have been closer if the platform had moved faster, but then you’re really talking about machine vs. machine. A human moving the platform around by hand would have been cool, but possibly very bloody if the Quattro took a misstep (unintentionally of course). The bottom line is that when it comes to simplified and repetitive tasks there’s really no beating robotic prowess. Think you could defeat the Quattro? You can’t. But if you need further evidence I’ll leave you with this video of the bot in its real world job. Give it time, and robots are likely to replace humans at every menial industrial task. Automation is here, it’s staying, get used to it.
[screen capture and video credits: BotJunkie]
[source: Adept Press Release]
