Baseball-playing Robots from Japan

The technology in the field of robot is getting more forward with increasing their abilities to do a complex and technical movement.  Ichiro Suzuki and Daisuke Matsuzaka are the playing-baseball robots, one pitcher and one batter.  Both of them can pitch and hit a ball with incredible result.  That three finger-pitcher robot can throws 90% of its speedballs in the strike zone and is not subject to pitch count.   Meanwhile, the batter robot has a sensor to determine whether his beat in strike position or not.  So that, the batter robot hits 100% of those strikes, and never swings at anything in the dirt.

Both of robots were created by Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa from University of Tokyo.  “The technology levels of these robots were very high”.   He said “thing difficult is in creating the mechanism which can satisfied the high demand”.

The pitcher robot can throw a foam plastic ball 40 kilometers per hour in speed.  Ishikawa want to increase it become 150 kilometers per hour and able to throw a ball with a curved or slip casting. For the batter robot, he will increase robot’s ability to beat a ball to all part of the field.