A robotic ball catcher with embedded visual servo processor

In this work we present a robotic ball catcher with embedded visual servo processor. The embedded visual servo processor with powerful parallel computing capability is used as the computation platform to track and triangulate a flying ball's position in 3D based on stereo vision. A recursive least squares algorithm for model-based path prediction of the flying ball is used to determine the catch time and position. Experimental results for real time catching of a flying ball are presented by a 6-DOF robot arm. The percentage of success rate of the robotic ball catcher was found to be approximately 60% for the ball thrown to it from five meters away.