A robot trained by Japanese engineers beat a samurai master swordsman in a recent exhibition of cutting skills by tracking the movement of the expert the same way video-game creators copy the moves of professional athletes for computer games.
Yaskawa Electric Co. researchers in Kitakyushu, Japan, recorded the movements of samurai master Isao Machii and then uploaded the
software into the robot, Motoman-MH24, UPI reported. What they created was a robot that can bisect fruit and handle a sword with nearly the same precision as the samurai.
A video of the robot in competition against Machii performing numerous cuts with a sword has been viewed more than 2.23 million times on YouTube since it was posted on June 4.
"The samurai machine carries out hard-angled cuts with speed and accuracy
without breaking any sweat," TechWorm.net reported. "Amidst the robot's most impressive performance is a party trick where it is able to slice a runner bean lengthways."
Digital Trends noted that the Motoman-MH24's skills are another evolution of robots first created to do mundane tasks.
"As per the information available on the company's website the MH24 robot was originally designed for industrial purposes such as assembly, dispensing, material handling, and packaging applications — but that's clearly not all it can do," the Digital Trend report reads.
"Although the robotic arm is seen precisely replicating Isao's movement, it must have required good amount of tweaking and re-do's, to give it the ability to automatically adjust mid-swing. Let's just hope this sucker doesn't find itself a set of legs and an artificial brain."
Some on social media already appeared to be a little worried about the MH-24 reboot.
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