Wiimote used to control robotic arm, effectively this time

Sure, it's been done before, but that doesn't make the idea of a robotic arm controlled by a Wiimote any less exciting, especially when the arm is actually responsive. That feat is aided considerably by the fact that this latest setup was developed by an engineer from National Instruments, who made use of some of the company's LabVIEW hardware and a specially-designed Bluetooth adapter to control the arm at the flick of a wrist (or using the Wiimote's buttons). Check it out in action in the video after the break -- don't worry, no one gets hurt.

[Chris @ May 21st 2008 6:50PM]

ahhh! autoplay!!!

[Tim @ May 21st 2008 6:50PM]

Wii fit my a**. This thing would make a much cooler game.

[andres @ May 21st 2008 8:09PM]

your ass could use a bit of wii fit

[Hayst @ May 21st 2008 7:10PM]

this will truly become scary when they design a robot to wield the Wiimote to control the robotic arm... and a robot to wield a Wiimote to control the robot wielding the Wiimote that's controlling the robotic arm... and a robot to wield the Wiimote to control the robot wielding the Wiimote that's controlling the robot wielding the Wiimote that's controlling the robotic arm...

i think i just broke my brain...

[Dave @ May 21st 2008 7:51PM]

What would happen if you had a closed loop of robotic arms controlling each other? That could cause problems with contradictory instructions racing from one arm to the next. They'd probably all get stuck moving back and forth a tiny bit.

Or, if you had the arm programmed for inverse kinematics so it would mimic the wiimote's actual motion and made a chain or loop then they'd move almost together, but with a little delay so that there would be a cool cascading effect.

[fgpx78 @ May 22nd 2008 3:30AM]

This will happen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_philosophers_problem

[jd @ May 21st 2008 7:22PM]

wake me up when someone finally build a gundam yet!!

[andres @ May 21st 2008 8:06PM]

wake me up when you use the correct tense

[brandon_r87 @ May 21st 2008 8:26PM]

You know the government has them, somewhere.

[Pochi @ May 21st 2008 7:27PM]

I think we can stop being excited about Wiimotes making shit do stuff.

Okay, an accelerometer made something move.

Yay.

[Ignatius @ May 21st 2008 8:31PM]

It's good to have a $40 mass produced controller that is easily available in any retail store.

It isn't a matter of proving that an accelerometer could control the robot arm, but more of an inexpensive, intuitive way to control it.

[Pochi @ May 22nd 2008 9:28AM]

So, accelerometers now cost $40. And you can make crap move with them.

Still. Stupid.

[Carl M @ May 21st 2008 7:41PM]

Lame video. They didn't show the Wiimote & the robotic arm at the same time, so there was no way to see what movement of one led to what movement of the other, and no way to see the latency either.

[Kawaiipikachu @ May 21st 2008 7:43PM]

When you engadget guys learn its Wii remote not Wiimote its like calling Nintendo Ninto

[andres @ May 21st 2008 8:19PM]

no wonder people looked at me weird when i said i had a ninto wii

[Ignatius @ May 21st 2008 8:32PM]

It's perfectly fine calling it a Wiimote, a lot of people do.

[ryan @ May 21st 2008 7:48PM]

I am a TA for the First Year Engineering program at the Ohio State University. Each year honors freshman engineers compete in a robot competition where teams of 3-4 students design and build an autonomous robot to complete a course designed and built by the TA's for the program. I and a few other TA's this year designed a system using LabVIEW and Wiimotes to visually track IR beacons mounted on each of the robots in order to send each robot's coordinates and heading information out via RF as sort of a faux GPS system.

LabVIEW is really an amazing system and has allowed us to do some amazing things.

[slumcat @ May 21st 2008 8:52PM]

I love LabVIEW, it's such an elegant "language". Simple to understand, and yet endlessly useful. Too bad the software is so expensive. And then, of course, you have to get some hardware to make it really useful (like the motion cards in the video, or Fluke controller card, etc.). Sucks to be poor, because those would be some fun toys.

[Platypus Man @ May 21st 2008 9:23PM]

OK, so how long until we get R.O.B. 2.0?

[Flalex @ May 21st 2008 9:25PM]

This arm was at the 2008 FIRST robotics world championships and I got the chance to try controlling it. It was a little bit laggy and not very intuitive to use, but fun anyway.

[Noah @ May 21st 2008 9:25PM]

The computer is Windows, XP, not Vista. Long Live XP!

[Alexander @ May 21st 2008 9:45PM]

Color me not impressed. They are not moving the arm anything close to what the remote is doing.

[thethirdmoose @ May 21st 2008 11:56PM]

I did something like this. I have a $100 "robot arm" - just 5 motors controlled by a driver attached to the parallel port. Movements of the wiimote corresponded to the movements of the arm, and movements of the nunchuck corresponded to movements of the wrist. I did this in 9th grade, and my robot arm sucked.

[alex @ May 22nd 2008 1:40AM]

damn easy!

[ziggit @ May 22nd 2008 9:48PM]

I actually saw that demo, NI is doing next year's controller for
FIRST Robotics, and they had a giant booth set up in the pit during
nationals. Not only did they have the robotic arm, but they also had
implemented Dance Dance Revolution using mainly FPGA's.
it was cool, apparently they had done just about everything from
generating the vga signals to syncing the beats to the music and
such. it was a really interesting setup, but sadly, it wasn't very
playable as a DDR variant >.<

[Photon Dan @ Apr 14th 2009 6:56PM]

LabVIEW is the best!