A Novel Platform Orientation System for ProportionalIntegralDerivativeControlled BallCatching Robot

Abstract

Ball catching by a robot is one of the challenging and complex control tasks that is extensively studied to achieve humanlike skills in robots. Over the last decade, several ballcatching robot designs have attained benchmarks in visual tracking and control algorithms. However, the coordination between the ball’s path tracking and the robot’s motion planning remains highly sensitive to environmental parameter changes. In general, ballcatching robots require a noisefree background with good lighting and multiple offboard tracking cameras. Also, a common failing point of these systems is the short flight time (or highspeed) of the ball and the uncertainties of throwing direction. To address these issues, in this study, we propose a ballcatching platform system that can rapidly orient the platform towards the throwing direction by utilizing two onboard cameras with multithreading. A graphical user interface platform has been developed to implement the orientation algorithm and mask the ball with high accuracy. Our experimental results show that the proposed orientation platform system can be used in a lowlight noisy background, and the overall ballcatching rate increases from 50% to 90% compared to the baseline design. The new system can also avoid erratic platform movements when masking is done in a noisy environment.