BallBot is the world’s finest autonomous ball boy!
BallBot picks up tennis balls so that you can relax and enjoy your serving practice. With this essential autonomous tennis assistant, practice is now more efficient and less painful. In the tennis equipment market, there exists very few advanced electronic devices assisting in the feeding and picking up of tennis balls. In fact, most tennis players spend more time picking up tennis balls after practice than the amount of time they spend hitting.
We aim to build a robot that can quickly and autonomously collect tennis balls and bring it back to the tennis player so that the player can have some time to rest. The scope of our project is serving practice. This is because many balls will be clustered together and the majority of the balls will be on one side of the net.
In a nutshell, our design emphasizes on building a lightweight, fast moving robot that is good at identifying and collecting tennis balls. More specifically, we aim to build a robot that can detect and collect 30 tennis balls at an average rate of 6 balls/minute, weighs less than 20 pounds, have a battery life of at least 30 minutes and be robust against hits from tennis balls.
For more details and specifications, please refer to the proposal presentation.