From delivering food to your door, serving us coffee and even removing cancerous tumors, robots can already complete a range of impressive tasks. But now a robot has taken on the golf course, being able to navigate itself to a ball and even sink a putt. Thanks to a 3D camera, the impressive robot dubbed Golfi can find golf balls and wheel itself into place before taking a shot. The camera uses an algorithm to detect hard-coded objects, scan the area and find the ball. Golfi (pictured) was created by the Paderborn University in Germany.

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.

Robots that can whack a golf ball down a fairway aren't exactly new, but building one that can play the nuanced short game is a more complex problem. Researchers at Paderborn University in Germany have done just that with Golfi, a machine that uses a neural network to figure out how to line up a putt and how hard to hit the ball to get it into the hole from anywhere on the green. The robot takes a snapshot of the green with a Microsoft Kinect 3D camera and it simulates thousands of random shots taken from different positions. It takes factors like the turf's rolling resistance, the ball's weight and the starting velocity into account. Paderborn doctoral student Annika Junker told IEEE Research that training Golfi on simulated golf shots takes five minutes, compared with 30-40 hours were the team to feed data from real-life shots into the system.

Abstract--We are developing a self-learning mechatronic golf robot using combined data-driven and physics-based methods, to have the robot autonomously learn to putt the ball from an arbitrary point on the green. Apart from the mechatronic control design of the robot, this task is accomplished by a camera system with image recognition and a neural network for predicting the stroke velocity vector required for a successful hole-in-one. To minimize the number of time-consuming interactions with the real system, the neural network is pretrained by evaluating basic physical laws on a model, which approximates the golf ball dynamics on the green surface in a data-driven manner. Thus, we demonstrate the synergetic combination of data-driven and physics-based methods on the golf robot as a mechatronic example system. With the aid of autonomous robots, the everyday life of many people should be made easier in the near future, e.g., by For this, a prudent action of the autonomous robot is essential.