A robot called Golfi is the first to be able to autonomously spot and travel to a golf ball anywhere on a green and sink a putt. Golf-playing robots have been developed before, but they have needed humans to set them up in front of a ball and program them to make the correct swing. The most famous is LDRIC, a robot that hit a lengthy hole-in-one at Arizona's TPC Scottsdale golf course in 2016. In contrast, Golfi, engineered by Annika Junker at Paderborn University in Germany and her colleagues, can find golf balls and wheel itself into place thanks to input from a 3D camera that looks down on a green from above. 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 speed and weight of the ball and the friction of the green, which are described by physics-based equations.

A robot called Golfi is the first to be able to autonomously spot and travel to a golf ball anywhere on a green and sink a putt. Golf-playing robots have been developed before, but they have needed humans to set them up in front of a ball and program them to make the correct swing. The most famous is LDRIC, a robot that hit a lengthy hole-in-one at Arizona's TPC Scottsdale golf course in 2016. In contrast, Golfi, engineered by Annika Junker at Paderborn University in Germany and her colleagues, can find golf balls and wheel itself into place thanks to input from a 3D camera that looks down on a green from above. 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 speed and weight of the ball and the friction of the green, which are described by physics-based equations.