Humanoid Robot Learns to Play Catch and Juggle from Disney

Normally, we would fret about potential machine apocalypses and references to the oh so many movies about artificial intelligences causing total disasters, but that is an overused joke at this point, so we won't.

Instead, we'll stick to the facts: Disney has created a robot with a head, two arms, two legs and a vaguely hourglass-shaped midsection that barely qualifies as a torso.

Disney also gave this humanoid robot the ability to juggle and play catch (complete with tossing the ball back to the thrower).

In addition to cup-shaped human hands, the bot uses an Asus Xtion Pro Live camera to track faces and incoming balls, much like Microsoft Kinect does. It even moves its head as if to look at the ball while it is in the air. Finally, any failed catch is followed by a shrug.

See the video embedded above for a demonstration and a succinct description of the whys and hows.