Japanese university developing humanoid robot that will play baseball

A Japanese university is reportedly working to perfect a range of robots, each of which can perform individual tasks, and combine them together into a single, humanoid robot that can play baseball.

A team of experts from the Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory at the University of Tokyo wrote on its website that they had been developing robots that can perform fundamental actions of baseball, such as throwing, tracking of the ball, batting, running, and catching, individually. It was achieved by controlling high-speed robots based on real-time visual feedback from high-speed cameras, they said, reported CNET.

A throwing robot uses fingers to throw the ball with precision just like humans and has displayed an accuracy of 90 percent. The batting robot, on the other hand, makes use of high-speed stereo vision to track the ball and adjusts its position every 1 minute to calculate the ball's trajectory and hit it from anywhere in the strike zone.

The bipedal running robot uses high-speed visual feedback to note the position of the robot and adjust its balance in real-time. The two catching robots use a hand that can open and close at a rate of 10 times per second and measure the balls flight using high-speed tracking.

A Youtube video uploaded by the team shows the robots in action and compares them to the players at the University of Tokyo Baseball Club while showing the robots' advantages.