Watch This Robot Attempt To Play Baseball

You know it is pretty sad when you actually need to enlist the help of robots so that they will be able to do their bit to offer your home baseball team the kind of cheering support that they need to get out of the doldrums. If only the ailing team could replace their human players with high performance robots that can hit the ball out of the park every single time, right? The Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory at the University of Tokyo have been dealing with robot research for a long time now, and this time around, they seem to be developing a humanoid robot which is capable of playing baseball, now how about that?

Apparently, this unique robot will be able to achieve fundamental actions of baseball that range from throwing to tracking of the ball, batting, running, and catching. These were made possible thanks to the real-time visual feedback received from high-speed cameras which in turn, will be “translated” into actual physical action. This is certainly an awesome engineering job done right, that is for sure. Does this mean we might be able to see a fully robotic baseball league some time down the road, where there will still be the human element behind it? [Press Release]

Edwin Kee
Categories: Robots
Tags: sports