Baseball players are always looking for ways to improve their batting performance. A lot of their gains come from practices between games. Toronto-based Trajekt Sports has developed a robotic pitching system designed to make those training sessions even more valuable.
Using trajectory data collected from major league pitchers, machine learning, high-precision motors, image processing, and ball-tracking technology, the team at Trajekt has developed Arc, a pitching machine that can emulate the speed and pitching style of professional players.
The system is already being used by seven major baseball teams, including the Chicago Cubs, according to Trajekt CEO Joshua Pope.
Pope came up with the idea for the system while he was still in high school in 2014. Around the time, tracking technologies such as Statcast and Trackman were starting to be used at baseball games.
Sports fans could now more easily see a ball’s curve after a fiery pitch or the homerun path of a grand slam. An avid sports fan and high school athlete, Pope said he thought a machine should exist that uses that data to help players improve their game.
“Why isn’t there a technology that leverages all the tracking technology that is used heavily in baseball for a product that can help batters practice against opponent pitchers?” he asked at the time.
So, Pope went about building that product himself while he was a sports engineering student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. He officially started Trajekt Sports when he graduated in 2019.
The team has partnered with Rapsodo, a sports data company out of Singapore with U.S. operations out of Saint Louis, to help it collect data. Rapsodo PRO 3.0, the company’s monitor technology that monitors hitting and pitching data, is integrated into the Arc. It is also working with Boston-based Onshape, a PTC business, which provides a CAD software platform.
Training the brain with robotics and data
Arc features 14 motors, three high-speed cameras, has 12 degrees of freedom, and comes in at 1,400 lb. Trajekt noted that the system presents videos of a pitcher’s release in both the wind-up and the stretch and has a feature called “dynamic release.”
That basically means the system is capable of firing a pitch from any release point, which allows it to pitch to both right-handed and left-handed batters. The pitching machine can also gyro spin the ball, which the company claimed no other pitching machine can do.
Players can choose specific pitchers they want to practice against. Trajekt billed its system as the most realistic and helpful way for batters to “experience the neurological stimulus of an in-game at bat before game day.”
Pope said he has always been fascinated with how the brain works, and that influenced how he designed the Arc. That’s also expressed in the way the machine works, he explained. The machine can add motion blur to the ball to help players recognize a certain kind of pitch and how they can see exactly how a pitcher winds up before release.
“One of our philosophies at Trajekt is that the way you can make smarter decisions is by training your brain,” Pope said. “We’ve taken a neuroscience approach to batter training.”
For now, given the price of the machine, the company is primarily aiming the machine at professional baseball players, but Pope said he hopes to offer the device to schools and to other customers.
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