The movie “Real Steel”, released in 2011, looks at a world where human boxing has been replaced with robots. “Boxers” outside of the ring control their robots by performing moves that they robots imitate. Special commands have even been developed that allow these robots to do complex movements to defeat their opponents. What distant time did “Real Steel” place this new reality?—2020. Given the 5-year delay in “Real Steel”’s incredible future, our group wanted to actualize this reality, hence the name REAL Real Steel.
To realize this goal, we set out to accomplish 2 main tasks:
Outside of just being really cool, REAL Real Steel has practical applications. Body movement imitation is essentially a form of teleoperation, which can be incredibly useful for many tasks, such as for prosthetics, high-precision robotic control, and even data collection for large-scale robotic learning tasks. Our unique way of performing teleoperation removes the need to hold on to a device with one’s hand, allowing for more accurate hand movements.
Our robot punch interface is also helpful outside of its original context. The ability to specify the final velocity of robots alongside final position and orientation can be useful for inverse kinematics that aim to optimize speed and need a specific incoming direction.
Below are the general design criteria and the design decisions we made for each task:
Hardware:
Software: