Bowling, Industrial Robot Style


If you like things like coil gun armed robosapiens, then you’ll thank [Aaron] for sharing his teams quest for the ultimate in stupid robot tricks. They hauled a 2800 pound industrial robot to the desert and used it to toss bowling balls… at an innocent RV. To top things off, they even lit one on fire. He even had to call the manufacturer up and sweet talk them into telling him how to speed up the robot so they could throw the balls even harder. The fire I can understand, but I’ve got no explanation for the roman gladiator or the bunny suit. Videos embedded after the break.


26 thoughts on “Bowling, Industrial Robot Style

  1. no worries, my apologies for sounding a bit jerk-ish in my previous comment. anyway i must say that is one awesome set up, i love their (quasi?) 3D trajectory program, not to mention the footage from that HD camera “rental” :)

  2. I can imagine the conversation:

    “$ROBOT_COMPANY, how can I help you?”

    “Hi, I’m using one of your robots to throw bowling balls an an RV, only I’m not getting enough range… Can you tell me how to get some more ‘oomph’ out of it?”

    “…”

    Great hack.

  3. nice hack! according to local university legend, some dumbasses in a robotic class once managed to send a position command with a negative z component to one of these robots, which then tried to smash through the floor and finally tore itself out of its mounting.. so beware ;-)

  4. I have seen the “University Legend” thing a few times. The first year kids often times ripped up tables and broke the robot’s concrete anchor bolts out of the ground. Fun times, people who do this usually are not aloud to touch the coding for their group from then on.

  5. “What happens almost yearly is people smashing through tables because of wrongly inputed Z components.”

    Not necessarily a negative Z component, but I remember having to input angles for the base motor and if you did not properly reset the robot to a well known initial position then all angles will be off. Yes- there were deep scratch marks in our table because of it…

  6. The making of that video looks like it must’ve cost quite a bit (borrow a robot, rent a generator, transport etc.) – who pays out that much for a hack-a-day and youtube video??

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