Development of a Vision Based Ball Catching Robot

Abstract

This paper investigates an automated solution for ball catching task using a static camera and an automatically controlled mechanical system. The robot system is able to catch a ball which comes towards the ball catching plane. The robot accomplishes the ball-catching task with different success rates according to the trajectory type and speed of the ball. The thrown ball is visually tracked through a ball detection image processing algorithm. 2D synchronized motion of the ball catcher is coordinated by PID algorithm. Experimental results are conducted to evaluate the robot performance.