I feel like you just showed me where Kings Cross platform 9 3/4 is…
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I hadn’t heard the term “googlon” before, but I like it!
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I’ve made another robot to just look at it.
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I don’t have any helpful knowledge, but “inverse kinematics” is definitely the search term you need.
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The general term for what you want to do is “inverse kinematics” - where, instead of specifying the position of a chain of linkages by setting parameters for each joint (shoulder, elbow, wrist etc.), you specify where the end of the chain (the fingertip) should be, and then compute the rest from that.
Your instinct is correct in that the usual solution is to do this by trial and error. You know how to calclulate the finger position as a function of the joint rotations (or other types of movement), and you know the value you want to end up with, and while it’s rarely practical to solve that equation analytically, there are very efficient algorithms (google “numerical methods”) for iteratively refining your guess at the correct parameters until it’s correct to the desired number of decimal places. You may have learned the seminal example of such an algorithm (the Newton-Raphson iteration) in high school.
There are whole books on this stuff, and it can get tricky with robot motion planning, but for simple 2D cases it’s not too hard to grasp. It’s a very powerful technique for animation, because once you have it set up, you can make the motion as complicated as you like without worrying about how to solve for a given target position (the solver is a “black box” to take care of that). So you can add things like friction and elasticity that make computed movements look more natural.
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As the robots get better at tossing and picking, workampers could lose their terrible jobs:
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Also, anyone else have the suspicion engineers might be planning their projects to target Boing Boing?
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“O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such bananas in’t!”
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