Design and development of an effective ball catching robotic arm with 3DOF

Abstract

This paper presents a ball catching robotic arm system with 3DOF assembled from the commercially available parts. In the previous research work complex system were designed. We have designed a very simple arm and take the results of catching ball at different angles i.e we throw the ball towards robotic arm at different angles (40 o ,45 o ,50 o and 60 o ) and get the results in our analysis we observed that the proposed system given its best results when the ball is thrown towards it at 40 o . In this system, camera system is use to perceive the trajectory of the ball, the system detects the ball with the help of a fast mean shift algorithm. It calculates the shift of the mean of the identified color intensity and according to that it sends the control commands over the serial port to the robotic arm. The basic objective to catch the flying object at the expected location. After the analysis it is observed that the catcher robotic arm can catch the ball thrown to it from 5-6 meter with an average success rate of 70-75% when throw at 40 o towards the arm.

Demonstrating vision based control using dissimilar, non-concurrent sensing with a ball catching robot

“…Other systems use ball catching to demonstrate the performance of a mechanical system, such as the system presented by Smith and Christensen which aimed to produce a high performance robot arm using off the shelf components [13]. Using the task to demonstrate the capabilities of low cost systems is a common variation of this, such as Sharma and Sekhon's system, [14]. Additionally, the system presented by Feigum demonstrates an implementation of a low cost mobile catcher [15].…”