Stanford Robots Load a Hovering Drone, Solve a Marble Maze, and More

Robots that sketch, play ping pong, solve mazes, and attempt to juggle strutted their stuff at the annual demo day for Stanford's Experimental Robotics class. Each year, Professor Oussama Khatib's students aim to teach a selection of industrial robots some new skills. The toughest project: teaching a Kuka robot to juggle. The other projects included two robots that had been taught to draw (a Sawyer and a Puma), a Ping Pong–playing robot (the Kuka again) that scored a few points against its human opponents, a cowboy hat–wearing Sawyer robot that shot at a moving target, a Puma 500 robot that manipulated a maze to send a ball along the correct path, and a drone-loading Sawyer robot that tracked a less-than-stable hovering drone. Check them all out in the video below.