Ted Williams, a former Boston Red Sox’s player and one of the greatest MLB hitters of all time, told the New York Times in 1982 that, “I’ve always said that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. The hardest thing – a round ball, round bat, curves, sliders, knuckleballs, upside down and a ball coming in at 90 miles to 100 miles an hour, it’s a pretty lethal thing.”

Short stop and Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith said that hitting is difficult, “[s]imply because you’re hitting a round object that’s traveling at 95 to 100 miles per hour and you’re trying to hit it on the square part of a round bat…It takes great hand-eye coordination. And the guys who do it and leave this game with an over .300 batting average, I look at those guys as being super, super players.”

A task you only need to achieve 30% of the time in order to be considered successful? Sounds perfect for a robot! All jokes aside though, picking up an object, estimating its kinematics and dynamics, planning how to manipulate the object so that it intercepts another object moving at high velocity at a desired position and orientation with an appropriate amount of force, and then executing that plan…just talking about it is a lot! Doing it all is an incredibly difficult task for a person and an even more difficult for a robot.

A robot that can do this may not be incredibly useful beyond being a cool party trick or a viral YouTube video, but the approach to solving this problem can be applied to other manipulation tasks that are more useful such as surgery, working on a construction project, or working with astronauts on the moon. That is why my personal research projects are focused towards this goal: having fun solving the challenging problems of getting a robot to play baseball in ways that translate to other, more impactful, tasks.