Watch this golf robot navigate to a ball by itself and sink a putt

While previous golf robots have required the assistance of a human operator, Golfi can find a golf ball on the green and figure out how to hit it.

Along Alice Klein

A robot called Golfi is the first robot that can autonomously locate and move a golf ball anywhere on the green to sink putts.

Robots have been developed to play golf before, but they needed a human to be placed in front of the ball and programmed to make the correct swing. Most famously he is LDRIC, the robot who achieved a long hole-in 1 at his TPC Scottsdale golf course in Arizona in 2016.

In contrast, Golfi, designed by Annika Junker and her colleagues at the University of Paderborn in Germany, can find the golf ball and the wheel itself in place thanks to input from a 3D camera looking down on the green. increase.

A camera scans the green, an algorithm approximates the surface, and then simulates 3,000 golf swings from random points toward the hole. It physically describes factors such as ball speed and weight, and green friction. base equation.

This trains a neural network to calculate the strength and angle at which the robot hits the ball.

“It’s like a pro golfer often practicing his strokes on the green the day before play,” said Junker, who unveiled the robot at the IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing in Naples, Italy, in December. I’m here.

After this, you can place Golfi and the ball anywhere on the green and the robot will move to the ball and try to hit it into the hole.

Golfi was able to sink over 60% of his putts on the flat 2m2 indoor green. The robot is not suitable for outdoor greens as it requires power connections and a 3D camera to be mounted above the green.

However, Golfi’s goal is not to win golf tournaments. The team aims to show how combining physics-based models and machine learning can simplify robotics applications, said his team member Niklas Fittkau, also at the University of Paderborn.