When androids dream of baseball fields To our American cousins, it's a manly sport called baseball. But here in old Blighty, much the same game - rounders - is played mainly by schoolgirls. Whereas in Japan, it's played by robots. A team at the Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory at the University of Tokyo are developing machines which can perform all the same tasks as a …
... before all your base are belong to us.
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Is there a point of having a Robot Baseball team? If the pitcher can throw the ball anywhere it wants but the batter can hit it anywhere in the strike zone and aim it anywhere it wants is there even a point to having a fielder? Nobody will be struck out and the 1st innings will never end as it will be permanent home run things.
tl;dr If the robots are so good will the game ever end?
Last thought - can the robots spit like 'pros' do? That's where the real skill is apparently.
Impressive stuff (I liked it being able to hit the ball into a basket), but that only resembles a schoolgirl in the sense of the Terminator's post-apocalyptic nightmare world. Still, put these mechanics into the DER2 Actroid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3tcSlWLS_g) and then we'll be getting somewhere interesting!
Edit: this as well - http://youtu.be/V7TKBFJMbi0
Put one of those new teraflop CPU modules in it and it might be about as smart as your average denizen of /b.
As least basic language skills can be achieved using just 10W and significant improvements have been made on low power cameras.
Just a thought but maybe this is why the "Terminator" eyes glow? infrared emission from the Kinect v3.0 headsets so it can see in three dimensions properly?
I'd always thought of baseball as being American and rounders British (albeit with different rules) but then I noticed that "base ball" is listed as one of Catherine Morland's sporting interests in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey which, though it wasn't published until 1818, was one of the first novels she wrote so the game must have been in common use in the 18th century in England.
Nothing to do with robots of course, though given Pride and Prejudice has been given the zombie treatment perhaps it is time that Northanger Abbey was given a Terminator variant!
Despite American claims that baseball is a uniquely American invention, it isn't.
Cricket, rounders and baseball are very closely related games. One curious fact is that the first international baseball game played between Great Britain (as it was at the time) and the US was won by the British but the first cricket game between the two was won by the US.
I know a lot of people outside the US, particularly in England, like to criticise baseball, but I love baseball and cricket and I think any cricket fan who took the time to understand baseball would enjoy it too.
I want to see how the batting robot reacts to a 100mph fastball.
I want the catching robot to catch a bouncing ground ball.
It can run, but can it slide?
And finally, that tracking robot...I'd want to see what it does in variable lighting, in the rain, in the snow, and in all the other conditions baseball players face.
Heck, that last point is valid for all of the above.
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