“In this research we develop a janken (rock-paper-scissors) robot with 100% winning rate as one example of human-machine cooperation systems. Human being plays one of rock, paper and scissors at the timing of one, two, three. According to the timing, the robot hand plays one of three kinds so as to beat the human being. Recognition of human hand can be performed at 1ms with a high-speed vision, and the position and the shape of the human hand are recognized. The wrist joint angle of the robot hand is controlled based on the position of the human hand. The vision recognizes one of rock, paper and scissors based on the shape of the human hand. After that, the robot hand plays one of rock, paper and scissors so as to beat the human being in 1ms.”
So say the rock paper scissors robot researchers at Ishikawa Oku Laboratory, Department of Information Physics and Computing, Department of Creative Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo. They offer this video:
(Thanks to investigator Adele Hsieh for bringing this to our attention.)
BONUS (somewhat related): Rock, scissors, monkey