Subject:
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RE: Sword fighting robots
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Wed, 21 Aug 2002 20:34:22 GMT
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Original-From:
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Meeker, Elijah <meeker@rayovac!avoidspam!.com>
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Viewed:
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886 times
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Okay, this is a pretty freakin cool idea, I am teaching my 5 year old son to
sword fight (under the premise of "light sabers") and would love to build a
robotic fencer. Here are some thoughts...
The basic premise of non-shield sword fighting is that your sword is your
offense /and/ defense. In defense you see an attack coming, you interact with it
and through fine motor skill you hope to gain the advantage. In attack you wait
until you see an opening (or create one) and strike as quickly as you can. Both
of these require an outrageous amount of processing power. Asimo couldn't
approximate even a very slow motion kendo due to the intense processing
requirements of timing, distancing and alignment. Now, if you had two vision
commands you could make some non-autonomous robots which would let you sword
fight by proxy, that might be pretty interesting.
If you limit the attacks you can also limit the defenses, but you still want to
have a defense be able to turn into an attack or you don't have much close to
sword fighting.
Fencing style, seems to me to mostly require fine motor skills and would be very
difficult to model with robots without using your brain for target acquisition.
I would of course be thrilled to be proven wrong on this, erm, point.
A kendo style of fencing might be easier to imitate. There is a fun (and noisy)
little game off the main page at www.kendoshop.com which might give an idea of
simplified movements a robot might approach.
For recording hits, assuming 3 sensor inputs (plus using the IR of the RCX to
find each other) you would want one touch sensor that would record a head
strike, one for the body/legs and one for the arms. In order to make hits from
either side count, you could design it so that a hit moves a post off the sensor
(which would be ON when not hit).
As to sword position... For both Offense and defense the left hand keeps the
bottom of the sword centered and the tip is aimed at the opponents eyes. This
makes a "shield" out of the sword by requiring only small movements to defend
against the larger movements of the attacker. During hits only the right hand
"steers", forward of the left hand to hit the head or wrists, to the side and
down to hit the body or legs (you would likely only try to make the robot strike
on it's right as left strikes are mechanically difficult). That there are no
real eyes for the robot isn't important, the important part is the swords
relationship to the targets.
As an off topic side note, fighting my 5 year old son is like fighting Yoda. It
is hard to hit anything but his head (which limits the places he has to defend)
and his most obvious target are my legs which are really hard for me to to
defend given the height of the originating attack. He has mastered several moves
that wouldn't work adult vs. adult, including striking up as a head block and
"rush in, feign to the face and whack the leg" with which he very often nails
me. A requirement of keeping two hands on the sword stops the most painful
whipping strikes, however, as he gets stronger I have had to start wearing
padded gauntlets...
At any rate, I really look forward to seeing what you may come up with, it
sounds like a fun project.
Elijah
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