So we’ve seen our fair share of robots in the past that are able to do far more than what one originally expected in the past – including juggling a fair number of balls without blinking an eye – not that it had an eyelid to begin with, that is. Well, here is a cool robot that was concocted by the Germans, where it is capable of analyzing and actually playing a game of pool – pocketing up to five balls in a row with its two arms.Thomas Nierhoff, a masters student at Technische Universität München (TUM), relied on a human-sized mobile robot with dual 7-DOF arms to achieve this vision, and the arms are able to manipulate a pool cue just like how a human does – hopefully with better accuracy thanks to a camera that is located above the table to track the various positions of the balls, helping the robot plan its shots in the process.
While easier shots can be pocketed with a success rate of around 80%, that does not mean it is ready to enter into a competition against humans, but when it comes to a robot-vs-robot tournament, it might prove competitive with the PR2.