Robots must do more than just playing sports

PREMIER LI KEQIANG visited a town in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province, on Monday, during which he played badminton with a robot. Yang Feng, an associate professor on automation from Northwestern Polytechnical University, commented:

In order to play badminton, a droid needs high-accuracy vision and image processing, as well as precise motion control. It has to recognize the shuttlecock in flight and calculate its trajectory and then anticipate where it can hit the shuttlecock.

In this process, the most important technology is high-accuracy vision, because the robot needs it to recognize the shuttlecock and make its move.