This golf robot uses a Microsoft Kinect camera and a neural network to line up putts

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 ...