Just recently I discovered an interesting topic about a
robot which is able to play baseball. It is a robotic system which acts as a
baseball pitcher and batter. It is named Robot Pitcher. It was made by
Masatoshi Ishikawa from Tokyo University. Robot Pitcher can throw a strike, and
about 9 percent of the time, the robot will challenge the batter into the
strike zone with the ball, which is pretty impressive. It was made in order to
demonstrate the latest advances in high speed industrial robot technology in a
fun way. They used a strategy focused on the superposition of wave patterns.
They also focus on the research related to robots that collaborate
with humans. In their research, they propose a collision avoidance system in
which high speed camera heads are placed on the robot’s manipulator in order to
increase human safety. This is also to see if the robot reacts similar to
humans under different circumstances.
In a presentation I saw, the researchers placed the robot
pitcher around 3.5m away from the mechanical batter. The pitcher’s 40km/h
sidearm throws posed little challenge to the batter, whose 1000 frame per
second camera eyes allow it to see the ball in super slow motion as it
approaches. The robot batter has a near perfect batting average when swinging
at pitches in the strike zone. There is even a 3D shape algorithm that uses
high speed vision with the help of an active light. To further improve this
robot, researchers plan to enable the robot to react to throws of up to
150km/h. Now that would be one awesome robot!
Find out more!
Kazrin Zaidi
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