'PhillieBot' Throws First Pitch At Phillies Game
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- As part of Science Day at Citizens Bank Park on Wednesday, a robot designed by a team at the University of Pennsylvania threw out the first pitch. But things did not go quite as planned.
The four member team insists their creation called PhillieBot throws just fine, but one pitch was all it got and that one came up about five feet short of the Phillie Phanatic.
In keeping up with its much-talked about reputation, a spattering of boos was heard inside the stadium as the pitch fell short.
"We've been out here to practice before and it's been able to throw it a lot farther, so we're not really sure. We'll have to go back and figure out what happened. We'd been talking about cranking up the pressure. It would have been good to do it before," explained one of the students.
The team thinks it may have overcompensated on the air pressure when the Phillies gave strict instructions not to hurt the Phanatic.
It was a tough break for these four young brains who spent the last two months engineering and building PhillieBot for the inaugural Philadelphia Science Festival.
Reported by Paul Kurtz, KYW Newsradio
