Japanese Robots Play Baseball

Posted 27 Jul 2009 at 23:10 UTC by steve

A baseball pitching robot that uses a hand developed by Masatoshi Ishikawa and other researchers combined with an MIT arm can lob a baseball at 40 Kph, hitting the strike zone 90% of the time. Ishikawa's sensor fusion project previously created a baseball batting robot. The batting robot relies on a high speed vision system developed by the same researches. If your goal is to understand sensor fusion in robots, what could be more natural that putting these two robots in the same room and having them play ball? Since the slow pitching speed makes things too easy on the batting robot, the researchers are working on improvements to the pitcher that will allow it to achieve ball speeds of 150 Kph. They also hope to improve the accuracy of the robot batter so that it can hit balls towards selected targets. Besides improvements in robot sensor fusion, this research will also lead to improvements in visual collision avoidance and realtime 3D shape recognition. Via PinkTentacle.com, via Mainichi