Monday, July 27, 2009

Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa at the University of Tokyo has developed two baseball-playing robots -- one that pitches, and one that hits. The three-fingered pitching bot throws a plastic foam ball at about twenty-five miles per hour, and lands ninety percent of its pitches in the strike zone, while the batting bot has a sensor which determines whether the pitches are balls or strikes, and hits balls in the strike zone with nearly one hundred percent accuracy. They are currently working on increasing the pitcher to about ninety-three miles an hour. The robots don't have any human stylings -- though, personally, we do detect a hint of Terminator.