Japanese researchers close to finishing baseball-playing robot

A Japanese research insitute is working towards building a robot that can play baseball, one individual function at a time. 

Scientists at the Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory, with the university of Tokyo, have been working on separate robots that can perform fundamental tasks in baseball; a robot for high-speed motion tracking, running, throwing, and batting, that they then intend to combine into one robot to do it all. Call it a baseball Megazord if you will. 

A pitching robot uses fingers to throw the ball, mimicing human movement, and has displayed a 90 percent accuracy rate. The n there's the batting robot that makes use of high-speed stereo vision to track the ball and adjusts its position for strike. It can hit the ball from anywhere within the strike zone and is even accurate enough to direct the ball's trajectory post-swing.

Another robot, Achires, is a bipedal running bot, that uses visual feedback to adjust balance in real-time and note its position. And finally, the catching robots use a hand that can open and close at a rate of 10 times per second, as well as sensors that calculate the ball's trajectory using high-speed tracking. One of the catchers is a fixed-arm version while the other has an extendable human-like arm.

The Youtube video above, posted by the research team, shows the robots in action and compares them to the players at the University of Tokyo Baseball Club. But only time will tell us just how well the robots can be integrated together. And if the project is successful, how long would it be before we're integrating individual robots capable of other feats? Picture this: a bi-pedal running robot, with high-speed visual tracking, integrated with some of the existing "auto-aim" weapons technology today, and maybe wirelessly linked to an infrared camera drone for good measure. Watch out, Skynet is coming.