Robotic Arm Pitches Baseball

Researchers at the University of Tokyo are proud to present a baseball-pitching robotic arm against a mechanical batter with a near-perfect swing, showing off just how far robotics technology has advanced. Don’t worry about robots replacing your favorite batter just yet, but we could see a robot baseball league develop sometime in the near future if such efforts continue to advance and propogate. The robot pitcher is made up of a high-speed, three-fingered hand mounted on a mechanical arm, offering superb control of its nimble fingers that can open and close at a rate of up to 10 times per second. This ability allows the robot to release the ball with perfect timing, enabling the robot pitcher to hit the strike zone 90% of the time. As for the robot batter, it comes with 1000-frame-per-second camera eyes, allowing it to achieve a near-perfect batting average when swinging at pitches in the strike zone.