Robot Batter Hits Ball Thrown by Robot Pitcher

Tokyo, July 23 (Jiji Press)--A "dream showdown" between a robot
pitcher and a robot batter took place at the University of Tokyo Thursday.
The result: the pitcher got hammered.

The pitching robot can throw nine out of 10 balls into the strike
zone, while the robot slugger can hit back any ball coming into the zone,
the university's intelligent robot development team said.
The technologies, which allow a robot to respond instantaneously to
a fast-moving object, should contribute to improving performance of
industrial robots, said the group, led by Prof. Masatoshi Ishikawa at the
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology.
Ishikawa's team, first, developed the batting robot in 2003 and has
since added many refinements to it. Now it has two camera eyes, and the
cameras trace the coming ball every 1,000th of a second so that the robot
could see the ball as if it were static at the hitting moment.
The machine hurler is the latest invention. It comprises a hand
with three fast-moving fingers developed by Ishikawa's group and an arm made
by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of the United States.
Unlike conventional pitching machines that use spinning rollers,
the robot can throw a ball to a desired point as the researchers achieved
precise, smooth movements of the fingers, hand and the arm.
In the showdown on the university's Hongo campus in Bunkyo Ward,
the pitching robot threw a ball at relatively slow speed of 40 kilometers
per hour, and the batting robot, positioned some 4 meters away from the
pitcher, hit the ball.
Ishikawa said that he hopes to enable the pitching robot to throw a
150-kilometer fastball as some human pitchers do and the batting robot to
send a hit to any targeted place.