is it possible to build a robot to catch bullets?

[papercut2008uk]

would it be possible to create a robot that could catch bullets that have been fired form a gun?

 

2 high speed camera's 

a computer

a robotic arm

 

i'm sure it would be possible with those things, 2 high speed camera's could see the bullet in slow motion as it was fired, the computer would process the information and find it's trajectory and impact point and the arm could move to catch or stop it.

 

 

[srbeen]

Youd need some fast motors to accomplish it, and they have to be able to withstand the force of the bullet. With current technology you can achieve what you want in terms of control. Something like a kinect/radar technology would be perfect to calculate the speed of the bullet.

[+jamesyfx Subscriber²]

I think in theory you could get a robot to catch a fast moving object. My thinking is some high speed cameras with motion tracking on them. But I'm not sure if a bullet would be large enough for the cameras to be able to successfully track it.

 

I'll ask one of my work colleagues about this tomorrow.. He's got a good answer for everything. :p

[Hum]

I just call Superman. :p

[Louisifer]

If you could get a fast enough motor that could withstand the force of impact I think the camera would be its weakness, maybe some sort of radar/laser setup?

[D. S. Veteran]

If by catch you mean "getting hit by", sure.

[Crisp]

Nothing is impossible.

[thomastmc]

In extremely well controlled and static conditions, with extremely sophisticated hardware and software, it would be possible. It would be also be very expensive, and require a number of people with a very high level of expertise in various fields.

 

Still, it's not going to be like a Robocop that can run around and catch bullets by any means. It wouldn't even portable. A wrong glint of light could even easily throw off it's calculation of the bullet's trajectory. It would have difficulty at first handling one bullet, and the more bullets you throw at it in a shorter amount of time the difficulty increases exponentially.

 

Anything that would actually be "cool", in terms of catching bullets out of the air, is still quite a ways off.

[Cute James]

I'm not sure about catching bullets, but this thing absolutely rules at 'Janken'!

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24803751

[Boo Berry]

It's not impossible but how do you want a robot to catch it? Swipe it out of the air?

[Hum]

A kevlar net would make more sense than a metal hand.

[Kami-]

  On 21/11/2013 at 00:46, Hum said:

A kevlar net would make more sense than a metal hand.

Kevlar coated ceramic slab plate makes more sense...

[Phouchg]

Using cameras for bullet motion and position detection will definitely not cut it. This is not WALL-E with Kinect for its head and even then image processing would be way too expensive and still slow for something as fast as a bullet, which travels at several hundred meters per second. Radars, lasers, lidars... probably.

 

Also, I'm not sure if there are actuators that can position an object that fast and, as mentioned, also the great amount of force transfered from the bullet without being damaged. I don't think it's really possible to catch a bullet any other way than allowing it to impact unless, I guess, the arms are strictly perpendicular to bullet's trajectory?

 

It would probably be easier to destroy bullets mid-flight using very high power lasers, like Lockheed's ADAM (but this for missiles, not projectiles).

[The Evil Overlord]

Ok, my battery's getting low so I've just scrolled past the comments, sorry guys.

Going purely on the tech you've suggested, I'd have to say no.

I'm not a ballistics expert by any standards, but I do believe the tech isn't quite there yet, for a system to recognise, track, accelerate, catch, then decelerate once caught, a bullet.

[Gerowen]

You'd have to have some sort of mechanism to trigger it by a visual stimulus, because most bullets travel at or over the speed of sound, so if it were sound activated it would have already missed by the time the sound got there.  I think the trickiest part would be figuring out how to tell the robot the gun has been fired.

[HawkMan]

Aegis cruisers I believe have a radar panel that is able to detect and calculate the trajectory of projectiles for strike back. However you're then talking the size of cannon shells, which is kind of outdated naval battles anyway.

So the technology exist. If you can make it detect small bullet projectiles... Maybe maybe not. You would need a engineer who understands the system fully to answer that. And it would probably collapse on automatic fire anyway.

Main problem would be actuators with the speed to do it. Maybe if it was a 1km or more range shot.

[The Teej]

Having just hi-speed cameras wouldn't cut it - you'd need a processor capable of not only image processing every frame (and we are talking hundreds, if not thousands of frames a second), but then have credible algorithms to detect the speed and pace of the travelling bullet and then make a motor react to the trajectory of the bullet - and even with that, the processor would need to make the correct trajectory estimation within the first second, if that, in order to give the motor enough time to actually get the bullet.

 

Could a machine do it? Uhh, theoretically, in a controlled environment, sure. I doubt a machine would be able to withstand multiple bullets fired though. However, could a bi-pedal fully automated automaton stop bullets? Not for a long time. 

[Arachno 1D]

As they say in exams always read the question and don't make assumptions

 

would it be possible to create a robot that could catch bullets that have been fired form a gun?

 

So by definition the robot does not need to track the direction of attack so its can be static and no particular "bullet"or speed is stipulated,So it could be say a black power device that fires on a preset direction at the "catcher" which could merely be a pad type device swatting Superman style rather than say catching as a sword Myth Busters style.

[Astra.Xtreme]

The idea behind it is pretty simple, but as others have said, the biggest hurdle is going to be finding a motor that can react fast enough to close the arm/hand, and also have a means of dissipating the kinetic energy to stop the bullet.

 

You'd use a high speed camera looking at the gun on a side view, and it would need some sort of software running a grid algorithm that knows the distance from the end of the gun barrel to the closest tip of the robotic arm.  From there it can detect when the bullet tip comes out of the barrel and using the grid algorithm, determine the velocity of the bullet.  If the distance is short enough, you can likely neglect gravity and the friction of air.

 

So yeah, it's fairly easy to determine when the bullet will reach the robotic arm, but since the bullet has so much energy, it would be extremely hard to transfer all that energy away from the bullet almost instantly.

[riahc3]

Hello,

A robot itself could not do it but a system dedicated to this would....

Between the robot and the gun, there would be a area that is marked and would be monitored each milisecond. Once a object is detected, it should be able to calculate its speed and direction. Since this area is monitored, it will know when the object will read the robot and predict in "catching it"

We have motors here at my work that move every 4ms. From a distance beyond 1000m, the robot should be able to catch ONE bullet.

More than one and things get VERY complicated.

[Lingwo]

I doubt it very much. I don't think anything would be able to process it fast enough. By the time it has worked out its speed and distance. The bullet will have probably already hit.

Under test conditions and knowing the speed and distance it would travel, then it would be very easy to it.

 

I'm sure the Mythbusters have already done this.

[HawkMan]

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5494435&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F5482534%2F5494381%2F05494435.pdf%3Farnumber%3D5494435

 

these guys seem to know how to do the tracking at least :)

[Astra.Xtreme]

  On 21/11/2013 at 15:25, Lingwo said:

I'm sure the Mythbusters have already done this.

They did something similar actually:

http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/02/mythbusters_catching_a_bullet.html