A Robot That Always Wins Rock-Paper Scissors

A group of researches from the Ishikawa Oku lab in Tokyo decided to show what human-machine cooperation systems are all about by creating a robot that plays janken, Rock-Paper-Socissors.

What they created was a robot who never ever loses the game. How? Recognition of human hand can be performed at 1ms with a high-speed vision, and the position and the shape of the human hand are recognized. The wrist joint angle of the robot hand is controlled based on the position of the human hand. The vision recognizes one of rock, paper and scissors based on the shape of the human hand. After that, the robot hand plays one of rock, paper and scissors so as to beat the human being in 1ms.

According to the timing, the robot hand plays one of three kinds so as to beat the human being.

This technology can be applied to motion support of human beings and cooperation work between human beings and robots etc. without time delay.