New Golfing Robot Can Find A Ball On The Green Then Determine How To Sink The Putt

golf ball on green by hole

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Forget LIV Golf causing headaches for the PGA Tour. Just wait until robots start shooting under par and decide they want a tour of their own.

We’ve already seen robots that can self-heal after being stabbed and autonomous robots that can build larger versions of themselves, so learning how to play golf should be a piece of cake.

This new golfing robot created by Annika Junker at Paderborn University in Germany and her colleagues has the ability to autonomously spot a golf ball on a green, navigate over to it, get itself into proper position, and work out the angle at which it needs to hit the ball in order to sink a putt.

They presented the golfing robot at the IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing in Naples, Italy, in December.

Oh, and they named it Golfi.

New Scientist reports…

The camera scans the green and an algorithm then approximates the surface before simulating 3000 golf swings towards the hole from random points, taking into account factors such as the mass and initial speed of the ball once hit and the green’s friction, which are described by physics-based equations.

This trains a neural network to work out how hard and from what angle the robot should hit any ball.

“It’s like how professional golfers often practice their strokes on a green the day before they play,” says Junker.

On the plus side (for humans), Golfi so far can only do this indoors because it requires a power connection and a 3D camera to be mounted above the green.

That being said, Golfi was able to make more than 60 percent of its putts on a flat, two-square-metre, indoor green, so it’s just a matter of time. After all, a robot already once made a hole-in-one once, six years ago at TPC Scottsdale.

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