Attention Makers

CATEGORY: ACCESSIBILITY

An Autonomous Tennis Ball Picking Robot

MAKERS: Kaiwalya , Avinash , Sarang , Sumedh COUNTRY: India

A mobile robot prototype that autonomously picks up tennis balls on a lawn tennis field which would ease the player's task of manually picking the balls,

 

The Purpose

Lawn Tennis often involves players hitting balls all over the tennis court. This results in accumulation of balls on the other side of court, especially during practice sessions. It is a tiresome job for the players to stop play and manually pick the balls. This project emphasizes the development of a mobile robot prototype that would autonomously pick up the tennis balls on a lawn tennis field. Such a development would certainly ease the player's task and would help in realization of this particular task of picking up tennis balls.

The Technology

The project involves the detection of tennis balls and robot using Haar Cascading technique in image processing. The localization module involves closed loop feedback from rotary encoders and gyroscope for yaw correction to achieve precise locomotion control. An algorithm featuring the nearest ball to the robot is picked up first. Dynamic detection of balls and bot is also achieved while robot is in run state. This ensures all the balls are picked up by the robot coupled with accuracy in locomotion. The robot thus returns distance traveled and velocity parameters in course of its traversal.

Additional Details

The project involves an overhead camera which scans the image of the field dyanamically. The Haar Trainer Program was trained with 4000 positive, 4000 negative images. It detects the number of tennis balls present in the frame and the position and orientation of robot as well. The camera is interfaced to the central processor which communicates to the robot via a pre-established bluetooth connection when powered on. The processor communicates to the microntroller on robot i.e. ARM Cortex M4 here. It sends out neccesary commands to controller. The robot thus picks up balls present with accuracy in locomotion and yaw.

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