Sunday, January 10, 2010
A pair of baseball-playing robots that can pitch and hit with incredible results have been developed by University of Tokyo professor Masatoshi Ishikawa, according to the Associated Press.
Here, a pitching robot grips a ball made of polystyrene during a lab demonstration. The robots don't resemble humans but instead the type of robots on a car assembly line.
The pitching robot - in the foreground - prepares to throw a pitch to the batting robot in the background.
The pitching robot, with its three-fingered hand, can throw 90 percent of its pitches in the strike zone. Although it can throws a plastic foam ball at 25 miles per hour, Ishikawa is hoping to increase the speed to 93 mph and make it able to throw off-speed pitches like curves and sliders.
The batting robot, which has a sensor to determine if pitches are strikes or balls, hits balls in the strike zone almost 100 percent of the time, and doesn't swing at pitches outside the strike zone. Ishikawa is also working on getting the batting robot to be able to hit to all parts of the field.
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