Million Eyes on the "Robot Ump": The Case for Studying Sports in HRI Through Baseball
Waki Kamino, Andrea Wang, Dhruv Agarwal, Sil Hamilton, Eun Jeong Kang, Jieun Kim, Keigo Kusumegi, Pegah Moradi, Daniel Mwesigwa, Yan Tao, I-Ting Tsai, Ethan Yang, Shengqi Zhu, Shu-Jung Han, Chi-Jung Lee, Michael Joseph Sack, Tianhong Catherine Yu, Weslie Khoo, Andy Elliot Ricci, Yoyo Tsung-Yu Hou, Boyoung Kim, Dr. Selma Sabanovic, David Crandall, Karen Levy, Malte F Jung
HRI, 2025
TL;DR
A position paper making the case for sports as a real-world testbed for human-robot interaction, using MLB's vision-based "robot umpire" to surface emerging questions in power dynamics, labor, and the technical challenges of large-scale computer vision deployment.