We humans love to scare ourselves with what we can accomplish. Horror movies, roller coasters, even robo-coasters, we enjoy creating something for the explicit purpose of making us nervous and scared.
Whenever we make a demonstration with our industrial robots that demonstrates lightning-fast speed, someone always wants to push it to the next level. For instance, some coworkers recently programmed the Adept Quattro robot to play the iPhone game “1 to 50” in the lab. This required a finger on the robot that would trigger the capacitive touch screen, and a suitable finger was found (from someone’s leftover Halloween collection).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGSLwy9ptgk]
Once we started sharing the video, we started getting comparison to the infamous “Knife trick” performed by Bishop in the movie Aliens, and people asking if we could put a knife on the robot and do it as fast as in the movie. For example, this guy, but faster.