A group of Japanese scientists are trying to build a robot that can play baseball as well as a human can.
Researchers at the Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory at the University of Tokyo are working on different robots that each have a certain skill required to play baseball, according to CNET. The team wrote on its website that these skills include throwing, batting, running, catching and tracking the ball.
"We achieved these tasks by controlling high-speed robots based on real-time visual feedback from high-speed cameras," the researchers wrote.
One of the robots is tasked with throwing the ball, and has shown to have a 90 percent accuracy rate, Daily News & Analysis reported. The pitching robot uses fingers to copy the movements a human would make when throwing a ball.
The batting robot, thanks to its high-speed stereo vision, is able to track the ball and adjust its position to hit it, allowing it to hit the ball from anywhere within the strike zone. This robot can even calculate where the ball will go after the swing.
The bipedal running robot can adjust its balance and note its position in real time with its high-speed visual feedback, CNET reported.
Last, but not least, are two catching robots that come with a hand able to open and close at a rate of 10 times per second. These robots also use high-speed tracking to calculate where the ball is heading.
The robots were shown in an experiment to perform better than players at the University of Tokyo Baseball Club. The team is now looking to develop a robot that will be able to perform all of these tasks, with the goal being to create an individual robot that can match up against a human baseball player.
