Touchdown! Robots Are Going to Football Film School

Imagine trying to track 22 athletes sprinting across a field in different directions, all while a brown leather ball flies through the air. For human coaches, studying game tapes takes countless late nights hitting the rewind button over and over. Now, the NFL has teamed up with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to train artificial intelligence to do the heavy lifting!

The university is getting special access to massive vaults of official NFL game footage and digital sensor tracking data. Tiny radio chips placed inside players' shoulder pads and inside the football itself record exact coordinates every fraction of a second. The researchers feed all this video and movement data into computer models so the AI can learn the rules, trick plays, and secret strategies of American football.