You skid to a stop against the cold cement wall, and bang on the locked metal door of the safe haven. Hurried footsteps penetrate through the sound of the rain, growing louder with each passing moment. Surely, it wasn’t supposed to be locked at a time like this. Shaking the icy water off your cold-numbed hands you rummage around in your pocket desperate to find the device. You can barely feel its sharp metal body stabbing into your fingers, but the nerves reawakening to your pocket warmth tell you you have it. Gingerly, you pull out a tiny robot and place it at the lock of the door “You got this” you say to the little guy, who nods and immediately gets to work picking the lock.
If that’s not some cool gadgetry straight out of my sci-fi dreams then I don’t know what is. Lock picking has always been made to look like one of the coolest things a human can do regardless of whether you’re an analogue safe cracker or a cyberpunk decryptionist. Having a robot that can pick that lock for you, well that’s the next level and it looks like I’m not the only one to dream of such things.
Sparks and Code is a YouTube channel that’s been trying to do exactly that, with trying being one of the more loadbearing words in that sentence. While they may be the forefathers of my little pocket story robot, one thing Sparks and Code has learned so far when it comes to tinkering with lock cracking bots, is it’s a lot harder than even they imagined.
Hackaday spotted the attempts to create a physics based robotic lockpicker that works by trying to sense the tension in each spring of the lock. This allows the robot to feel the resistance provided to each pick attempt, and thus be able to gauge how long the pins are and apply the correct amount of pressure. Of course more expensive locks may use more complicated barrels that get around this, but it’s a valid method for some beginner robot lock picking.
The idea came about after Sparks and Code’s first robot, which essentially brute forced a pin lock but could take days to do so. This more direct approach was an aim to speed up the robot lock hacking process. By having a robot actually sense what is happening inside the barrel of the lock, it should be able to apply the correct pressures and voila.
Unfortunately, the implementation appears to be far more elusive than the idea. Through much torment both code and machine have been tweaked but for now, this project has been put into Sparks and Code’s shame bin, at least for now. The experiment has a long way to go with more variables and fixes before we have a cyberpunk lock picking pocket bot, but I love that someone is working on it anyway. A bit like Cyberpunk 2.