In our recent roundup of robot baseball All-Stars, we had lots of hitters and pitchers, but we were sorely lacking in catchers besides King Kizer–which, to be honest, is more liable to be carried off by the ball than stop it. Luckily, the scientists at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have rolled out Rollin’ Justin (whose day job is being a space robot) to take the field.
This robot is made for catching can nab up anything thrown from 5 meters away with 80% accuracy. It even has the pizazz to grab a ball in each of its 4-fingered hands at the same time. To achieve these feats in retrieving, Rollin’ Justin is equipped with a fast image-recognition, and control software that’s linked to off-board computers which predict the balls trajectory every 20 milliseconds.
Be sure to check out New Scientist to see a video of Rollin’ Justin in action.
[German Aerospace Center via New Scientist]
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