Background
Traditional tennis matches require ball kids to retrieve out-of-bounds of tennis ball on tennis court. There were accidents of ball boys getting injured due to high-speed flying tennis ball, or extreme weather conditions. To reduce injuries and provide a smoother game flow, an automatic ball collecting mechanism during tennis matches is required.
Currently, there exist some solutions of automatic tennis ball collecting mechanism. For example, Tennibot is a business product, which can save players and coaches time by eliminating the tedious task of collecting tennis balls on the court. However, Tennibot is only suitable for a non-competitive environment, such as collecting a batch of balls from the ground after tennis ball training session, due to its weakness in dynamic response to incoming flying ball, in terms of the absence of dynamic ball movement detection, weak mobility and collision avoidance.
Objective
After analyzing various current solutions of automatic tennis ball collection mechanism, we found that none of them are suitable for our requirement of fast dynamic ball retrieval during tennis ball matches. Therefore, this project proposed an intelligent Automatic Tennis Ball Collector (ATBC), which can retrieve out-of-bound tennis balls on the tennis court during matches. ATBC can accurately detect the tennis ball movement and move dynamically on the court to retrieve it, so that human intervention could be minimized.
In this project, research of various fields will be conducted, for example, robot’s localization, object detection and path planning. At the end of this project, a fully functional physical robot will be designed, manufactured, and tested. It would consist of a processing unit, chassis, camera modules and ball picking mechanisms.