Researchers from the University of Paderborn, Germany, succeeded in developing a robot that plays golf with great accuracy, but over short distances from the game, using the Microsoft “Kinect” camera and other additional digital units.
Kinect is a remote control unit dedicated to the famous “Xbox” game device, which is developed by Microsoft, and the researchers relied on it to increase the accuracy of the robot’s targeting of the hole to drop the golf ball.
According to the American Engaget website, the robot called Golfi also uses a digital neural network to learn how to direct the blow and how difficult it is to hit the ball to get it into the hole from anywhere on the green.
The robot takes a 3D snapshot of the green with a Microsoft Kinect camera, simulates thousands of random shots taken from different positions, and takes into account factors such as grass rolling resistance, ball weight and starting speed, to finally make the right decision to hit the ball with skill.
