Students at Stanford University have created a robot capable of playing ping pong. Forrest Gump, eat your heart out.
The ping pong-playing robot came about as part of a class assignment. As explained in the clip, students in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory spend the first half of the class working on various assignments that apply what they've learned in a previous course. Then, the students get to select from a number of different robots, pick a task and code the robot to perform said task.
Oussama Khatib, professor of computer science, notes that students used vision, tactile perception, force sensing and position sensing to create the demonstrations. Some of the other projects shown in the clip include a robot playing ball in a cup and another that catches objects thrown at it.
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