Japanese Robots playing baseball

Masatoshi Ishikawa with collaboration of other researchers developed a hand robot that can pitch a baseball. This MIT arm can lob a baseball at 40 Kph, hitting the strike zone 90% of the time.

Ishikawa has also created a baseball batting robot. The batting robot relies on a high speed vision system. IF the goal is to understand sensor fusion in robots, what could be more natural than putting these two robots in the same room and let them play baseball. The slow pitching speed makes things easy on the batting robot, so the research team is working on improvements to the pitcher that will allow it to achieve ball speeds of 150 Kph. They are aiming of improving the accuracy of the robot batter so that it can hit balls towards selected targets. The research team aims not only to improve the robot sensor fusion, but also the visual collision avoidance and realtime 3D shape recognition.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 9:10 am and is filed under Computer, Gears & Gadgets, Science & Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.