DETROIT – A robot built by a group of Detroit high school students will throw out the first pitch at the Detroit Tigers' Wednesday game against the Toronto Blue Jays.
CBS Detroit reports the group of about 30 teens spent the summer building the robot, dubbed "Cy-ber Young."
“It’s a robot designed to throw out the pitch. It’s about the size of a shopping cart and uses a big scuba tank as the main source of power," Colm Boren, an engineer and mentor for the FIRST Robotics organization tells CBS Detroit. "So, we use that as basically a big pea shooter to blow the ball through a piece of PVC pipe. There’s a camera that’s used and the robot actually travels out to the mound on its own."
The student can steer the robot with joystick controllers like the ones used for a video game and also have a laptop. Boren says the students are able to manipulate settings such as velocity and trajectory of the ball.
“We’ve clocked it at upwards of 85 miles per hour," Boren tells CBS Detroit. "We could probably go a bit higher so it’s definitely more than the average person can throw, but not as much as a professional baseball player."
"Cy-ber Young" will be the first student-built robot in history to throw out the first pitch at a Major League Baseball game.
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