Badminton is silly and soft and dainty and not tennis, right? I don’t know anymore! This impossibly fast rally makes it seem like an impossibly fast sport played by humans who have impossibly fast reaction times. Even robots couldn’t see the ball and hit the ball so fast. It’s incredible.
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There’s a greater chance of an alien spacecraft landing on earth in the next five minutes than there is of a badminton net surviving more than one summer afternoon. They’re not exactly designed to be long-lasting, or easy to setup, which is why this all-in-one badminton court kit could be a great investment as the snow starts to melt away.
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I don’t get badminton. Isn’t it basically just tennis played like volleyball, while hitting something called a birdy? The birdy is also called a shuttlecock, which sounds like an astronaut chicken. I don’t get it. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t be impressed by this robot badminton player.
At the Flanders’ Mechatronics Technology Centre in Belgium (okily dokily!), researchers built a robot that they can play badminton with, called JADA. It’s pretty impressive to watch JADA in action. Its stereo vision system detects the shuttlecock from two visual angles. It then estimates the position of the shuttlecock and the robot’s software predicts the trajectory. After that an interception system hits it at the right point along the predicted trajectory.
That’s the same way that you would play – but your playing wouldn’t impress me. On the other hand, it impresses me that we can create a robot that does all this so well.
So why build a badminton robot in the first place? Its creators wanted to build a badminton robot to demonstrate new robotic technologies they are developing, and thought this would be a great way to showcase them in a single robot.
[via euronews]
Kids who grew up without a sibling or relative somewhere in their age range would have to figure out different ways to interact with others as he or she grows up, and from what I have read so far and watched in movies and cartoons, these lonely kids tend to have imaginary friends, and sometimes they are of the otherworldly kind (brrr!). Well, here is a robot that might just keep your kid entertained if it were to be further researched and developed for the masses – researchers over at the Flanders’ Mechatronics Technology Centre (FMTC) in Belgium have managed to develop the first robot of its kind to play badminton.
Yes sir, this badminton robot will be nowhere near the level of Lee Chong Wei and Lin Dan, but it is a start – and a good one, at that. Right now, it remains as a guinea pig to test a software application which was specially designed to optimize energy efficiency where machine design is concerned. We do wonder just what other kinds of sports that robots would be able to get involved in down the road, but a kid-friendly badminton robot sure sounds viable in badminton crazy countries.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Robot Could Milk Cows In The Future, FDA Approves Robot Doctor, 
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