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There's a Whole Lot of Sword-Fighting Robots Out There

Well, at least three.
​Image: YouTube grab

What if this is what Skynet turns out to be: a bunch of awkward sword-fighting robots. There are surely enough of them, with the latest coming via Namiki Lab in Japan.

​Via IEEE Spectrum, here's the description offered by its creators:

We propose a sword-fighting robot system controlled by a stereo high-speed vision system as an example of human-robot dynamic interaction systems. The developed robot system recognizes both of the positions of a human player and that of the sword grasped by the robot hand. And it detects the moment when the human starts to move by using ChangeFinder which is a method of detecting the turning points. Next it predicts the possible trajectories of the sword of the human player by a least-squares method from the moment when the attack started. Finally it judges the kinds of the attack and generates an appropriate defensive motion. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.​

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But that's just the most recent sword-fighting bot, the latest in a long lineage it seems. In 2011, students at Stanford unleashed "JediBot":

JediBot is enabled by a repurposed XBox Kinect color sensor. "We use the color image to isolate the sword from the background, because the opponent's sword is green and nothing else in the background is green," said graduate student and JediBot co-creator Ken Oslund ​at the time.

Next, we have Georgia Tech's 2010 creation below, which doesn't seem to have a cool name. ​As an IEEE post noted then, the idea here is that one of the best ways to teach robots human interaction is to teach them to view humans as adversaries: "On a fundamental level, a lot of what sword fighting is about is predicting the intentions of a human and then deciding how to respond. By teaching a robot to defensively (just defensively, mind you) block incoming sword attacks, the idea is to create a general model that robots can use to react quickly and safely around the unpredictable movements of nearby humans."

It makes sense, but programming robots to view humans as enemies is maybe not the greatest idea ever—you know, in case one happens upon a real sword or worse.​

Oh, wait. Nevermind. They already did.

A YouTube commenter wearing a fedora ​had this response, which is the most fedora-y comment one could possibly hope for (short of including a #gamergate tag, I suppose): "Let me just say that the robot furthermost from the camera has poor yabatzi technique. In a real katana fight me with, that robot would be nothing but scrap metal and broken wires. I suggest these amateur scientists go back to the drawing board. Slow technique, weak thrusts, poor stance, and awful sword play. How are they going to defend a lady in distress with such bad skill?"​

Fear not, ladies: Sol Ancan, "/r/orientalgonewild moderator and /r/animefans power user," has your back.