When you recover from a good shove, you don't see it as a big deal, even though your body's going through a billion adjustments to prevent you from tipping over. Robots today are too slow to make these calculations, so a poke in the side is quite likely to send the million-dollar machines to their death.

Now think about balancing a ball on your plate--tricky, and you'll usually drop it in less than a minute. Francesco Prosperi at the Sant'Anna School for Advanced Studies of Pisa, Italy, however, has designed a robot with reflexes so fast it doesn't drop the ball even when you push it around the tray. The tray in this case is a FLEX board riddled with microcontrollers, which give the main unit data about the ball's position--it's the equivalent of a touchscreen monitoring your finger's position.



It may not sound like much, but if robots can get fast enough to balance balls better than humans, it means that eventually we'll see robots that can right themselves while walking, which means more human-like motion. It's one of those "small steps for robots but giant leaps for robotkind."

Source: NewScientist