Visual recognition and automatic control technology is an important way to realize robot automatic ball picking. Therefore, a tennis robot motion control method based on ant colony algorithm is evaluated. After the camera position was fixed, the motion control system software was designed, and the optimal path was solved by ant colony algorithm. The results show that the two adjacent positioning errors and the current total positioning errors fluctuate around -0.05 mm and -2.29 mm, respectively, and the fluctuation range is less than 3.50 mm. Ant colony algorithm is superior to greedy algorithm in path planning of collecting tennis balls. The number of iterations of ant colony algorithm for optimal path planning of 30 to 50 tennis balls is about 20 to 30 times, and the path length is reduced to reduce the time of collecting tennis balls, which meets the actual work requirements.