Related papers: Scattering of a Baseball by a Bat
The Rattleback is a very popular science toy shown to students all over the world to demonstrate the non-triviality of rotational motion. When spun on a horizontal table, this boat-shaped object behaves in a peculiar way. Although the…
Chirality-induced spin selectivity has been reported in many experiments, but a generally accepted theoretical explanation has not yet been proposed. Here, we introduce a simple model system of a straight cylindrical free-electron wire,…
Scattering of a spin-1/2 particle off a spin-0 target is formulated based on a simple three-dimensional momentum-spin basis. The azimuthal behaviour of both the potential and the T-matrix elements leads to a set of integral equations for…
This manuscript is a statistical investigation into the 2017 Major League Baseball scandal involving the Houston Astros, the World Series championship winner that same year. The Astros were alleged to have stolen their opponents' pitching…
This paper studies real-time motion planning and control for ball bumping motion with quadruped robots. To enable the quadruped to bump the flying ball with different initializations, we develop a nonlinear trajectory optimization-based…
Major League Baseball (MLB) recently limited pitchers to three pickoff attempts, creating a cat-and-mouse game between pitcher and runner. Each failed attempt adds pressure on the pitcher to avoid using another, and the runner can intensify…
Numerous statistics have been proposed for the measure of offensive ability in major league baseball. While some of these measures may offer moderate predictive power in certain situations, it is unclear which simple offensive metrics are…
We present a robotic table tennis platform that achieves a variety of hit styles and ball-spins with high precision, power, and consistency. This is enabled by a custom lightweight, high-torque, low rotor inertia, five degree-of-freedom arm…
In similar-sized planetary collisions, a significant part of the impactor often misses the target and continues downrange. We follow the dynamical evolution of "runners" from giant impacts to determine their ultimate fate. Surprisingly,…
Accurate dynamic models for racket-ball bounces are essential for reliable control in robotic table tennis. Existing models typically assume simple linear models and are restricted to inverted rubbers, limiting their ability to generalize…
The pursuit-evasion game is studied for two adversarial active agents, modelled as a deterministic self-steering pursuer and a stochastic, cognitive evader. The pursuer chases the evader by reorienting its propulsion direction with limited…
There have been more hitting streaks in Major League Baseball than we would expect. All batting lines of MLB hitters from 1957-2006 were randomly permuted 10,000 times and the number of hitting streaks of each length from 2 to 100 was…
Sliding parts in nanosystems such as Nano ElectroMechanical Systems (NEMS) and nanomotors, increasingly involve large speeds, and rotations as well as translations of the moving surfaces; yet, the physics of high speed nanoscale friction is…
A small and light polystyrene ball is released without initial speed from a certain height above the floor. Then, it falls on air. The main responsible for the friction force against the movement is the wake of successive air vortices which…
Analyzing a player's technique in table tennis requires knowledge of the ball's 3D trajectory and spin. While, the spin is not directly observable in standard broadcasting videos, we show that it can be inferred from the ball's trajectory…
In the problem of cylinder rolling without slipping on a horizontal floor, both the cylinder and floor are generally treated as rigid bodies in normal textbooks. When the air resistance is ignored, the equation of motion has a solution with…
In a granular gas of rough particles the spin of a grain is correlated with its linear velocity. We develop an analytical theory to account for these correlations and compare its predictions to numerical simulations, using Direct Simulation…
The seminal Bradley-Terry model exhibits transitivity, i.e., the property that the probabilities of player A beating B and B beating C give the probability of A beating C, with these probabilities determined by a skill parameter for each…
Because splashing is such a violent process, one might naively expect that neither the direction of droplet emission nor the amount of ejected material can be controlled with any precision. Even though it is observed countless times in the…
In a balls-in-bins process with feedback, balls are sequentially thrown into bins so that the probability that a bin with n balls obtains the next ball is proportional to f(n) for some function f. A commonly studied case where there are two…