BERTI the robot is the latest in British robotic design and he's been pitting his wits against all comers in games of 'rock, paper, scissors' at the Science Museum in London to show off his manual dexterity.
BERTI has been designed to make human scale gesturing, meaning he shrugs his shoulders, waves his arms and opens and closes his fingers just like a human does when speaking.
"He is built to have joint dexterity and proportions as close as possible to a human. All the way from his gross joints, like his shoulder and his elbow, all the way to the joints in his hand so that he can move around and do gestures appropriate to speech," said PHD student Paul Bremmer, from Bristol Robotic Laboratory (BRL) who programmed the robot.
The design is the result of collaboration between BRL and Elumotion, which built BERTI. He gets his name from 'Bristol Elumotion Robotic Torso I'.
Many robots can move and talk, but it is much harder to get them to move in the same way a human skeleton does. While programmers can't give BERTI muscles, they have given him mechanised joints to move in an identical fashion and speed as a human does. BERTI's torso has 36 degrees of motion, such as an elbow joint. There are nine in each hand alone, meaning the mechanics are hugely complicated.
As a bit of fun, BERTI's designers made a glove with sensors on for humans to wear when challenging the robot to a round of the child's game 'rock, paper, scissors'. The robot waves his arm three times and makes either a fist (rock), flat palm (paper) or sticks two fingers out (scissors) and can sense via the special glove what his opponent has done, so he can declare "I win", "You win" or "It's a draw".
While humans like to think there is a certain strategy to the game, with BERTI it is purely random, which could actually be to his benefit.
"Berti's advantage I guess is that he doesn't try and pre-guess what we are going to do, he doesn't get bogged down with psychology. He has a one track mind that he will win," said Co-Director of Elumotion, Craig Fletcher, who built BERTI.
After losing several rounds to his creation, a frustrated Fletcher joked: "I sometimes think he cheats a little bit though, because you have got to understand that this glove has to go through him for him to understand what is working, so maybe there is a little bit of Berti coercion going on."
Computer programmer Bremmer thinks he knows how someone could defeat BERTI.
"You possibly can outwit the robot to some degree if you know something about computer random number generators, which are very unlikely to generate the same thing more than once, so it is not going to do the same thing twice in a row. So, you can probably, if you actually think about it quite hard guess roughly what the robot is going to do because it has only got a choice of two really after having done the previous one. So you probably can outwit the robot if you try," said Bremmer.
For all the fun people have playing games with BERTI, he could also one day have serious applications. Elumotion hopes the technology will be used in developing prosthetic limbs or to help people whose limbs have lost motion.
"If you get to somebody who has had a stroke fast enough, then if you add manipulation back to their arms they can regain some of the movement that they have lost. Maybe you could use him as a very accurate means of manipulating somebody into position," he said.
BERTI's technology could also be harnessed as a kind of brace for people with tremors, such as Parkinson's sufferers who need help with everyday tasks, like dressing themselves or eating with a knife and fork.
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