Baseball Robot

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!

Source: http://www.robaid.com/robotics/baseball-robot-shows-high-speed-dexterity.htm

Kazrin Zaidi

Google’s Robotics Car Project

For these recent years, Google has been working on a big project, innovating new technology that makes people’s life better, more secure and more comfortable with Self-Driving car. People who have ridden them often quickly response that it’s obvious that computer is a far better driver than human. Business Insider explains that Google uses lasers and radar as sensor to monitor and process immense number of inputs as well as react and responses to situation faster than human ever could.

This project is still unfinished but the day for us to enjoy this technology is drawing near. Google has so far making a great progress, the cars under the computer control have been driven for over 500,000 miles without accidents. However, Google still have several enticing challenges to work out, such as, driving in snow, unmapped roads, driving through construction zones, accident zones and other situations. This challenges are not easy to dealt with, so the “drawing near” I mentioned earlier is equal “several years to take” but apart from this let’s just enjoy the video below.

In the short video, a blind man walks out of his house and gets to one of Google's robotic Cars, equipped with high-tech device and tool. The man, Steve Mahan says, "Where this would change my life is to give me the independence and the flexibility to go the places I both want to go and need to go when I need to do those things”. At the end, Google says Mahan is the first customer of Google's self-driving car, calling him "self-driving car user #0000000001". He is really lucky right?.

So how is your feeling with this great technology, imagine going anywhere without road planning, imagine going a long trip with a car without even driving it, you can texting, playing with your kids and enjoy the trip along the way. But hold on, what if the car hits others or accident occurs in a way the computer and robot do not recognise, who the police should blame? The robot? The computer? The car? Or Google?. Let’s wait for the answer.

Links for: Picture Video Source

Ricky Mardian