The Hexa-Bouncer Plays Ping Pong With Itself
Keeping a ping pong ball bouncing is easy enough for a person to do, but it's a lot to ask of a robot. Electron Dust's Hexa-Bouncer tackles the problem with a six-axis moving platform, a pair of high-speed cameras, and enough processing power to figure out where the ball is going before it falls to the floor.
The mechanism is a Stewart platform, also known as a hexapod. Six independently controlled arms connect a fixed base to a triangular upper platform, allowing it to move with six degrees of freedom: up and down, side to side, forward and backward, plus pitch, roll, and yaw. This lets the bouncing surface move vertically to hit the ball while simultaneously tilting to correct its trajectory.
It has to move fast to keep the ball bouncing (đź“·: Electron Dust)
Making those moves quickly enough to react to a bouncing ball took some fairly serious...
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