Photo Credit: World TeamTennis
A robot referee can really keep its ‘eye’ on the ball
Science News for Students, August 20, 2020
I wrote this article back in January and February 2020. The whole point was to have it ready to publish in advance of the 2020 Summer Olympics. But then the world changed. When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down pretty much everything, my article got delayed indefinitely. Then the Olympics were canceled and I wasn’t sure if it would ever run! But finally, this summer, we got to working on it again.
The idea for this article was simple – something about tech in sports. But that is too huge of a topic to tackle. So I narrowed it to AI in sports. That still wasn’t narrow enough. Eventually I decided on automated officiating. Some other angles I considered were:
- Smart sports equipment
- Sports analytics and player recruitment
- A sport invented by AI (look up speedgate.)
Amusingly, when I went to interview people for this article, I was a little worried because my knowledge of tennis is so basic. I’m a science and tech writer, not a sports writer. I was comfortable with the complicated technical questions, but not with ones where I had to talk about the game! Was I using the right terminology? Probably not… but my sources didn’t seem to mind too much.
My favorite story from the article is this one: a baseball player slid into home plate, moving the plate very slightly. But the TrackMan computer system that was determining balls or strikes couldn’t actually see the plate. It only knew where home plate was supposed to be. Meanwhile, the pitcher and batters played based on where home plate actually was. This was enough of a discrepancy to cause some problems!
