We usually associate robotics with tasks that are, if not high tech, at least modern in nature. That’s why it’s so cool to see a robot being adapted for a task that is explicitly ancient: scraping away at animal skins with replicas of
We usually associate robotics with tasks that are, if not high tech, at least modern in nature. That’s why it’s so cool to see a robot being adapted for a task that is explicitly ancient: scraping away at animal skins with replicas of stone tools found at archaeological sites.
Radu Iovita, an archaeologist at the Monrepos Research Center in Neuwied, Germany, studies microscopic wear patterns on ancient stone tools to try to determine how they were used. The conventional way to do this wear analysis is to make a fresh copy of the stone tool that you’re looking at, and then scrape a bunch of animal hides with it using the technique that you’ve guessed was used on the original. If, after a while, your new stone tool shows the same sort of wear pattern that the old stone tool does, you can have some level of confidence that you’ve been using the same technique. If the wear pattern is different, you make a new tool and try again.
This, to put it mildly, can take a while, and Iovita wanted to find a way to standardize and expedite the process. And so, robots. Iovita enlisted the help of professor Jonas Buchli at ETH Zurich, who conscripted a Kuka lightweight 