In case you missed it: There's a new trailer out. For the latest Star Wars film. Which you need to watch now, if you haven't already. (We have it embedded further down in this post if you need it. Go ahead; we'll wait for you to finish.)
As any padawan knows, Star Wars displays an interesting combination of people wielding high-speed spaceships and also wielding medieval looking glowing swords, called lightsabers, when it comes to the traditional mano-a-mano that action movies love to have. This is all united by a grand thing that unites the universe, if you only know how to tap it, called The Force (and it's best you read that link to really understand what that means.)
Meanwhile: sword-fighting robots are now a real thing in our own universe. For reals. Check it out the scary creation from Namiki Laboratory in Japan below, which actually isn't the first such creation, IEEE Spectrum points out. It follows on from visions from Georgia Tech and Stanford, among others. But yeah, new idea or not, this is pretty scary stuff to watch.
"I will never, ever, ever understand why robotics researchers seem to feel the need to persist in teaching their robots how to use swords, of all things," writes Evan Ackerman of IEEE Spectrum. "At some point, this is all going to go horribly wrong, but until that happens, we can enjoy the videos," he added.
He makes a valid point. People playing with sharp objects is an inherent danger in itself; a robot doing something similar requires a little more, er, care in making sure that the programming is solid. That you can anticipate the robot's moves and parry it, thrust for thrust. And cross your fingers that it doesn't run loose and wreak havoc with your equipment or worse, with your fellow researchers.
But here is a little bit of fun -- could such a robot stand up to a lightsaber? It's fun to try to imagine a being made of metal wielding a glowing sword, going against a legendary knight such as Luke Skywalker or the more powerful Obi-Wan Kenobi. (We leave out references here to the prequels, assuming it's less likely you've seen them.)
Well, as we pointed out earlier, a good Jedi (or a bad Jedi that moves to the Dark Side and basically loses his/her stripes, but not his skills) not only needs to be talented with a blade when doing his or her work. There also is that Force you need to tap into to help guide your actions, a sort of guiding light that (we suppose) in part shows you where to point the blade next.
Can a robot access the Force? Here's a true puzzle for Star Wars fans, and we'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Because if that robot can't do it, it's pretty much doomed unless it is able to move much faster than a Jedi can anticipate. If it can, then run for the hills because there might be an invasion of robots instead of clones in one of the sequels.
Either way, let's hope that we see some robot action in the next Star Wars film, which comes out in December.
Top image: Count Dooku weilding two lightsabers in a prequel episode of Star Wars. Credit: LucasFilm/Star Wars Wikipedia
