Getting robotic arms designed may seem old hat but making them do exactly what they have been programmed to, is not always a cakewalk. Stanford Professor and IEEE Fellow, Oussama Khatib encourages his students to come up with new possibilities using the control theory and the various robotic arms in the lab. These include  the Kuka LWR, the Kuka IIWA, the Barrett WAM, and the Kinova Jaco. For those not aware of the fact, these are huge robotic arms used in the indutries to perform tasks such as assembly, welding, and painting.

The student team has now got to come up with something that needs computer vision and force control. The idea is to get them to make the robotic arm perform a function that has to be predecided and programmed. The students who take Khatib’s class get to come up with more creative and innovative uses of the industrial robotic arms. In most cases the results can be quite unexpected.

Past science projects have included complicated stuff like figuring out the best move in a game of dominos, or staying one step ahead of a moving model space station to prepare for docking, or learning to play a tune on a xylophone by listening to it.