Ever wanted to see a robot playing at being a master swordsman? Well, now’s your chance thanks to an enterprising Japanese firm by the name of the Yaskawa Electric Corporation.
The company has put together the Yaskawa Bushido Project which shows its Motoman-MH24 290kg industrial robot learn from a Japanese master swordsman, Isao Machii, and then take him on over a series of challenges to test their skills with a blade.
The above video, which tech site Motherboard spotted, shows the massive robot arm learn from the motion tracked movements of Machii and then duplicate them flawlessly.
There are four challenges in total: the diagonal cut, rising cut, horizontal cut, and the "thousand cuts" test of endurance.
Although we must admit in challenge number two, it seems to us that the robot takes away a bit too much of the flower in the rising cut -- although what do we know...
That said, in the third one, the horizontal cut, the robot slices through six oranges in a row compared to the human’s one orange -- though Machii’s cut seems more perfectly horizontal to us. Maybe a case of quality over quantity...
Though the sword wielding robot certainly shows frightening precision when it slices a pea-pod horizontally in half.
And as for the last challenge, well, executing a thousand cuts clearly takes its toll on the master swordsman, causing him some grimacing and light sweating -- and obviously doesn’t trouble the robot which could go on and on.
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