There's a thin line between science fiction and reality and often times the things that amaze us on the silver screen are merely party tricks that wouldn't work in real life no matter how hard our imaginations try to get along with our beliefs.
According to a recent article published in Space.com, the "Star Wars" robots that everybody have come to know and love have been proven to no be effective in real-life desert.
This is a funny topic to write about as most of my articles tend to focus on serious topics. It's nice when you get a juicy tabloid technology topic to dig into for a deeper understanding of the issues.
It still seems hard to imagine that professionals are actually spending time on this but this study has been conducted and has scientifically come to the conclusion that the BB-8 would simply not be effective in the scenes depicted in the movies. This study was presented in the journal Science Robotics. However the report did give honorable mention the iconic beeping communication used by R2D2 and BB-8.
Murphy asked Dan Goldman, a physicist at Georgia Tech, whether a spherical robot like BB-8 would be able to move around over rough terrain like sand — and "he just started giggling hysterically," Murphy told Space.com. ['Star Wars' Droids That Already Exist]
Well, the hysterical laughing seemed to be easy enough to understand as Dan clearly knew the answer to Murphy's question to be a resounding 'NO.'
But why was Dan so confident about this matter? Well it turns out, Goldman bought one of Sphero's remote-control BB-8 toys right after the movie came out. He set it up in his lab and tested the robot locomotion over a variety of granular materials.
"They run sand[fish] lizards through there, they run snakes, salamanders, the whole thing," Murphy said, referring to types of moving robots. "And they put BB-8 in there, and they gave it a little ramp with plywood, and it rolled in, and then — thwump! Just buried itself into the sand. And then they tried it again — it was a repeatable experiment. The only variation would be that occasionally it would stop so suddenly the head would fly off, which is kind of fun."
This whole story is extremely amusing to me. What can we look forward to in the future? Will future Star Wars movies need to employ physicists and scientists to conduct R&D in the design of their robot characters?
All in all I think the BB-8 robot that was released after the movie came up is really cool! I still want one even if it isn't a great bot to play with in the desert!
What are your thoughts on the technology shown in Star Wars?
Will we most likely see some of the technology used in the movie franchise showing up in real life? Swords replaced by lightsabers? Laser weapons?
Please leave your thoughts on this topic below!
Source:
'Star Wars' Robots Wouldn't Survive the Real World - Space.com