What happens when you have geeks with an industrial level robotic arm laying around? Well, take feedback from a Nintendo Wiimote and control it of course! The USMechatronics article stated that they used VB for the software, and Direct X to read the values coming from the joystick (example via CodeProject).
In the video below, you’ll see that these guys managed to take the motion feedback from the Wiimote to swing a tennis racket (actually hitting the ball) and wield a sword!! According to the sources, this arm is capable of moving 16kg of load at full speed and accuracy, so standing a nice distance away is probably a good idea.
via USMechatronics, Coding4Fun, and Robotster
