Stanford Robots Load a Hovering Drone, Solve a Marble Maze, and More

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Robots that sketch, play ping pong, solve mazes, and attempt to juggle strutted their stuff at the annual demo day for Stanford’s Experimental Robotics class. Each year, Professor Oussama Khatib’s students aim to teach a selection of industrial robots some new skills. The toughest project: teaching a Kuka robot to juggle. (It struggled, with balls getting stuck or flying wild… but as anyone who has tried to juggle objects can tell you, the learning curve is very steep.) The other projects included two robots that had been taught to draw (a Sawyer and a Puma), a Ping Pong–playing robot (the Kuka again) that scored a few points against its human opponents, a cowboy hat–wearing Sawyer robot that shot at a moving target, a Puma 500 robot that manipulated a maze to send a ball along the correct path, and a drone-loading Sawyer robot that tracked a less-than-stable hovering drone. Check them all out in the video below. Learn More Stanford Oussama Khatib drones robotics education Stanford Experimental Robotics IEEE Spectrum’s blog featuring the people, places, and passions of the world of technologists in Silicon Valley and its environs.Contact us:  t.perry@ieee.org Subscribe to RSS Feed Editor Tekla Perry Palo Alto, Calif.