Design and develop of an automated tennis ball collector and launcher robot for both able-bodied and wheelchair tennis players - ball recognition systems.

摘要

Tennis is a dynamic sport game that requires players to hit the ball to the opponent‟s court to score point. A survey was conducted on some of Tunku Abdul Rahman College and wheel chair tennis players. They often find it difficult to conduct training alone. Many of them feel it is a waste of energy to move around the tennis court to collect balls during training sessions. It is also inconvenient for wheel chair tennis players to pick up balls. The author proposed a robot that functions as an assistant to collect and launch tennis balls to the users when prompted to. The objectives of this project are to design and develop ball recognition system, to be able to identify ball objects and to be able to determine balls locations correctly and accurately. In the ball recognition system, the author proposed a colour recognition technique to extract the tennis balls from the background. In addition, region properties such as area, eccentricity and bounding box properties of a tennis ball were discovered to differentiate tennis balls from the background and other similar objects. The location of tennis ball is discovered by determining the centroid and from the ratio of image pixels to actual distance. This method was successfully implemented to recognize the presence and the location of tennis balls with respect to the robot. This system is integrated together with tennis Balls Collector System, Ball Launcher System and Robot Navigation System to complete its final tasks.