Robots will one day rule the world. It’s the inevitable conclusion to the story called humanity. We still have years to go before that though. In fact, pro table tennis players may be buying us some time.
To test its latest robot arm, the Kuka Robot Group set up a table tennis match between its Kuka KR Agilus robotic arm and Timo Boll – a professional table tennis player from Germany. The competition was meant to show the capabilities of Kuka’s robotic arm, but it also showed us that humanity is still more dextrous than robots.
Of course, none of this to say that robots are terrible at tablet tennis. The KR Agilus gave Boll some trouble and it could handily beat any untrained table tennis player. The important thing to remember here, however, is that the pro tabletop tennis players will one day save us from the first invasion when they embarrass the robots back into hiding. There may be no saving us when the robots come back with plasma rifles though.
If you want to see how Kuka put all this together, here’s a making of video. There’s not a lot of making of though as the video mostly plays as another ad for Kuka’s robot. It’s still pretty cool as we get to see Boll face off against five robots at once.
[h/t: Gizmodo] Image via KukaRobotGroup