Japanese researchers develop baseball playing robots, Mark Buehrle reportedly unimpressed

Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa at the University of Tokyo has developed two baseball-playing robots — one that pitches, and one that hits. The three-fingered pitching bot throws a plastic foam ball at about twenty-five miles per hour, and lands ninety percent of its pitches in the strike zone, while the batting bot has a sensor which determines whether the pitches are balls or strikes, and hits balls in the strike zone with nearly one hundred percent accuracy. They are currently working on increasing the pitcher to about ninety-three miles an hour. The robots don’t have any human stylings — though, personally, we do detect a hint of Terminator.

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  Unless you’re Mark Buehrle, it’s nearly impossible for humans to play a perfect game of baseball. But for robots, feats like batting 1000 are already a reality.
  Developed by the University of Tokyo…
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  Baseball is a national sports in Japan and so it was just a matter of time for this baseball- and robot-crazy country to invent (industrial) robots that are able to play baseball…
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  Two years ago, a military robot used in the South African army killed nine soldiers after a malfunction. Earlier this year, a Swedish factory was fined after a robot machine…
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