Baseball Robots Almost Ready To Challenge Humans
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 27 of July , 2009 at 4:57 am
Robots might not be quite ready to play soccer against humans, but from the looks of this video, professional robot baseball is not too far away at all. These industrial robots are using baseball to demonstrate their ability to work together while dynamically adapting to rapidly changing situations. The pitcher uses a robot arm from MIT coupled to a high speed three fingered hand from the University of Tokyo, and it’s capable of throwing a ball into the strike zone at 25 mph 90% of the time. The batter, meanwhile, is only 11 feet from the pitcher, but using camera eyes running at 1000 frames per second, it has plenty of time to decide when and where to swing, and boasts a “near perfect” batting average against strikes. In the future, the pitcher will be able to throw a variety of pitches at over 90 mph, while the batter will be programmed to repeatedly hit to the same place.
Now, the problem here is that these robots are already just about at the point where watching them play an actual game of baseball would be pretty dull. The robot pitcher will always throw strikes, and the robot batter will always hit it wherever it wants. Home run every time? Sure, no problem. Barring a mechanical malfunction, the robot players wouldn’t make it out of the top of the first. The only solution would be to limit the capabilities of the robot, either mechanically or by introducing some kind of stupidity or randomness into the AI… But I think maybe instead we should just agree that baseball is a game best played by us humans with our charming flawed brains and slow reflexes.
[ Mainichi (Translated) ] VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]
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Category: Industrial
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