At last, somebody built a robot that does something useful rather than just wait around to gain sentience and kill us. This guy is so cute he would never hurt anyone. I think. Ex-NASA engineer and inventor Mark Rober has built a robot that can skip the perfect rock. Sadly, this ‘bot can’t gain any satisfaction from the task the way a human does.

As it turns out, the keys to the best rock skips are four simple factors: you have to have a rock angle of 20 degrees, a rock path angle of 20 degrees, you have to spin the rock as much as possible and lastly you should choose a rock that is flat on the bottom and as heavy as possible for you to still get to your maximum arm speed.

That’s all well and good for human rock-throwing pros, but if you’re this robot, you just do what you’re told and throw the damn stones.

One day robots may skip humans across the water like big fleshy rocks and when that day comes, you can look back and see that it all started here. But for now, we are safe.

[via Geekologie]