Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » Sports

Robot Tennis Partners Coming Soon?

curiouscat — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 04:24:47 +0000

The robots in the video, and many more, are being tested at the Flying Machine Arena at the The Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology – Zurich.

They also usually have a number of challenging projects available. Qualified, motivated students should visit the Theses/Projects page and contact them to learn more. We need more people working on these types of things so I can have my robot basketball team available when I want to play.

sOccket: Power Through Play

curiouscat — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 12:44:45 +0000

In a fun example of appropriate technology and innovation 4 college students have created a football (soccer ball) that is charged as you play with it. The ball uses an inductive coil mechanism to generate energy, thanks in part to a novel Engineering Sciences course, Idea Translation. They are beta testing the ball in Africa: the current prototypes can provide light 3 hours of LED light after less than 10 minutes of play. Jessica Matthews ’10, Jessica Lin ’09, Hemali Thakkara ’11 and Julia Silverman ’10 (see photo) created the eco-friendly ball when they all were undergraduates at Harvard College.

sOccket creators: Jessica Matthews, Jessica Lin, Hemali Thakkara and Julia Silverman

They received funding from: Harvard Institute for Global Health and the Clinton Global Initiative University. The

sOccket won the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award, which recognizes the innovators and products poised to change the world. A future model could be used to charge a cell phone.

From Take part: approximately 1.5 billion people worldwide use kerosene to light their homes. “Not only is kerosene expensive, but its flames are dangerous and the smoke poses serious health risks,” says Lin. Respiratory infections account for the largest percentage of childhood deaths in developing nations—more than AIDS and malaria.

Watch a June 2010 interview on the ball:

NHL Experiments with the Rules of Hockey

curiouscat — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 18:15:27 +0000

The NHL’s ice-capades

The players—who were, in an attention-getting wrinkle, mostly top junior stars eligible for the 2011 draft—road-tested everything from two-on-two overtime to shallower nets to having the second referee view the play from an elevated off-ice platform. On day two, viewers were confronted with the bizarre spectacle of the traditional ﬁve faceoff circles being replaced by three, running up the middle of the rink.
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Placed in charge of the R & D effort, and the sales job surrounding it, is retired hockey great Brendan Shanahan, now the league’s vice-president of hockey and business development. “There were some ideas that were adventurous and others that were subtle,” says Shanahan, about the recent camp. “I wanted to capture the full spectrum.” Shanahan, who had the final say on the testing schedule, takes the scientist’s view that a “negative” experimental result can be as useful and instructive as a “positive” one. “Sometimes you just have to see things play out to really satisfy your curiosity,” he says. “What I told people that got sort of frightened at some of our far-out ideas is that sometimes your goal is to breathe life into an idea—but other times, you try it out because it’s time to put it to bed.”

I applaud their willingness to try experiments. I am a sports fan who doesn’t find much interest in the NHL, but I do enjoy Olympic hockey.

Friday Fun: Aerodynamics for Sports

curiouscat — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:33:55 +0000

“Impossible” Soccer Kick Leads to New Physics Equation

The amazing goal — which left French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez too stunned to react — was scored during a friendly match in the run up to the 1998 World Cup. A group of French scientists, perhaps desperate to prove that at least the laws of physics weren’t actively rooting against their national team, have been able to figure out the trajectory of the ball and, with it, an equation to describe its unusual path.
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It all comes down to the fact that, when a sphere spins, its trajectory is a spiral. Usually, gravity and the relatively short distance the ball travels cover up this spiral trajectory, but Carlos was a mere 115 feet away and kicked the ball hard enough to reveal its true spiral-like path.

In this open access paper, the spinning ball spiral, the authors explore the science behind ball paths in different situations.

one can identify sports dominated by aerodynamics (table tennis, golf and tennis) and sports dominated by gravity (basketball and handball). In between, we find sports where both gravity and aerodynamics play a comparable role (soccer, volleyball and baseball). Indeed, in the first category of sports, the spin is systematically used, while it is not relevant in the second category, and it only appears occasionally in the third one, in order to produce surprising trajectories.

Friday Fun: Robocup 2010, Robot Football

curiouscat — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:44:43 +0000

Robocup 2010 took place in Singapore and 2 German team faced each other in the finals. Robocup is an international research and education initiative. RoboCupRescue is a related effort to develop rescue robots for hostile environments.

Friday Fun: Amazing Goal

curiouscat — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:12:36 +0000

This amazing goal illustrates what is possible with an amazing football (soccer) player and some physics.

Basketball Padding

curiouscat — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:53:23 +0000

Basketball used to be considered a non-contact sport. Now more and more college and pro players are wearing padding. March Madness, this year with more padding

Plumlee and dozens of other college basketball players wear compression shirts and shorts dotted with foam and plastic shock-absorbing pads under their uniforms. There are also padded sleeves for the elbows and knees. In the past few years players have started to wear this layer of protective gear meant to feel like a second-skin in a sport that has bigger, faster and stronger athletes than ever.
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“Some of the things you’ll see like these products, a lot of them tend to be more fads that come and go,” he said. “But anything that comes down over the edge of a bony prominence, or on the knee, makes sense. For the ribs — there’s cartilage that is a natural shock absorber so I don’t know how truly affective that piece might be.”

Purchase: McDavid knee and elbow pads – McDavid Hex Power Shooter Arm Sleeve – Hexpad Thudd with Extended Thigh

Robot Playing Table Tennis

curiouscat — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:51:19 +0000

This video shows the robot has a ways to go to become a decent ping pong opponent. But progress is being made. How soon before I can have fun competing with some robot basketball players?

TOPIO can play table tennis with human beings. It has a head, two hands and six legs. It can hit the ball, calculate scores and express feelings upon losing or winning a game. Four high-speed cameras help TOPIO identify the trajectory of the ball and accurately return shots. TOPIO knows how to hit an incoming ping pong ball when it has traveled only 20 cm from the opponents paddle.

The made-in-Vietnam robot TOPIO captured special attention at the International Robot Exhibition (IREX) held in Tokyo in late 2007.

Engineering a Better Football

curiouscat — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:28:13 +0000

The football (soccer ball) for the 2010 FIFA World Cup features completely new, ground-breaking technology. Eight 3-D spherically formed panels are moulded together, harmoniously enveloping the inner carcass. The result is an energetic unit combined with perfect roundness.

Aero grooves create the clearly visible profile on the ball’s surface. The Grip’n'Groove profile circles around the entire ball in an optimal aerodynamic way. The integrated grooves provide unmatched flight characteristics, making this the most stable and most accurate Adidas football. The ground breaking performance features have been confirmed in comprehensive comparison tests at Loughborough University in England and countless checks in wind tunnel and the Adidas football laboratory in Scheinfeld, Germany.

The process, shown in the video, for manufacturing the footballs is way more complicate than I thought it would be.