Have you ever seen a robot playing pool? That’s right, this DIY Pool robot can play some serious game and even moves around the table to find the best angles. Check out the video after the jump, amazing.
Thomas Nierhoff, a masters student at Technische Universität München (TUM), used a human-sized mobile robot with dual 7-DOF arms that’s able to manipulate a pool cue similarly to how a human does. A camera above the table tracked the positions of the balls and helped the robot plan its shots, separating each into various difficulty thresholds to help the bot decide which it should take. It managed to nail most of the easier shots about 80% of the time, which isn’t too shabby, and seems like it would probably make it competitive with the PR2.
