July 27, 2009

Robots Invade the Great American Pastime

Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa, from the University of Tokyo, has managed to come up with a couple of robotic baseball players. The Pitcher is a 3-fingered hand that can throw a foam ball 90% of the time in the strike zone at 25 mph. (We guess the other 10% is to keep things interesting.) The Batter has a sensor to detect strikes and balls, lets the balls go by, and hits 100% when it does swing.

The professor is working on getting the batter to hit in all parts of the field and increasing the pitching speed to 93 mph. While this is an interesting idea in the ability to make robots perform particular actions, we think the only ones who would watch a game with an entire robot team would be ASIMO and Wakamaru.

MLB