Robotic Tennis Ball Collector

Neha Chawla, Wuqayan Alwuqayan, Ahmed Faizan, Sabri Tosunoglu

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering
Florida International University
Miami, Florida, USA
305-903-8455, 786-419-0915, 786-972-7523, 305-348-1091
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
cited as evidence. The theory goes that the name tennis derives
from the Egyptian town of Tinnis alongside the Nile and the word
racquet evolved from the Arabic word for palm of the hand, rahat.

ABSTRACT
This paper describes a robot to collect tennis balls in a driving
range and is called as Robotic Tennis Ball Collector (R.T.B.C).
This system avoids stopping the players for ball collection
permitting a higher use rate of the field. The purpose of this
prototype is to avoid any object found on its way and pick up
tennis balls by detecting and then collecting them. R.T.B.C will
reduce the time and effort required in collecting the tennis balls
from around the tennis court.

Tennis was first created by European monks to be played during

religious ceremonies for entertainment. When it began, the player
hit the ball with the hand. Soon after that leather glove came into
existence which was later replaced with a handle for effective
hitting and service of the ball and thus a racquet. Tennis balls
underwent frequent alterations due to the evolution of racket from
the first wooden ball to leather ball filled with cellulose material.
The game was cherished by the monasteries across Europe during
the 14th century. The royal family of France adopted this game
during 16th and 18th centuries and was called Jeu de paumme and
was regarded highly by kings and noblemen as the game of palm.
The French players would shout Tenez which meant Play
when the game would begin and later the game was called
Tennis.

1. INTRODUCTION
Robots have always been an object of fascination in our society.
They have been portrayed as humble servants of man as well as
evil creations that rise to overthrow their masters. All robots share
one thing in common at the root of their design and purpose - they
can perform tasks in place of humans. Life is filled with many
repetitive tasks, and if robots are able to perform those tasks, they
can help to ease an overarching burden. With that said, robots are
optimal replacements for humans in a multitude of scenarios. As
simple as it may seem, the primary action in many repetitive tasks
is picking up objects and moving them to other locations. Be it
picking up garbage from the floor, moving parts along an
assembly line or removing fallen debris, robots that can pick up
and move objects will always be useful.

In 1480, Louis XI of France forbade the filling of tennis balls with

leather, sand and sawdust but instead be made with good leather
and filled with wool. Scottish craftsmen made tennis balls from a
wool-wrapped stomach of sheep or goat and tied with rope. Some
that were recovered from hammer beam roof of Westminster Hall
during restoration were found to be manufactured from a
combination of putty and human hair.
In 1874, Major Walter Wingfield acquired the patent rights for
equipment and rules for the game which bore close resemblance
to modern tennis. Charles Goodyear invented vulcanized rubber
and since then Germans have been most successful in developing
vulcanized air filled rubber balls.

Tennis players develop their skills by repetition, in order to

achieve that goal they practice with several balls one after the
other. After the balls are finished, the player and the instructor
have to pick up the balls to continue the training, wasting money
and valuable time. Nowadays, the balls pick up and its delivery to
the balls dispensing machine is carried out with human
intervention, by using some machines with trolleys but always
driven by humans. In order to improve this task, the need for
dedicated and specialized vehicles is becoming a must, not only to
speed up the task but also to reduce the maintenance costs of the
whole system. The main goal of this project is to design and build
a prototype of a tennis ball collector which will be useful indoors
and outdoors. The prototype is able to walk freely on the floor
avoiding obstacles. The prototype is able to locate tennis balls and
pick them up

The first tennis court emerged in US in 1874. The original court

devised by Wingfield was in the shape of an hourglass which
tapered at the net. It was shorter than the modern court which we
have today.
Wiingfields design of tennis court and rules underwent several
changes since then till the game gave to the modernized version
which is played today. Later the game spread to different parts of
the world like India, Russia, China and Canada.
In 1877, the All England Club held the first Wimbledon
tournament, and its tournament committee came up with a
rectangular court and a set of rules that are essentially the game
we know today.

2. HISTORY OF TENNIS
Some people believe that that the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and
Romans played different versions of tennis. Drawings and
descriptions of any tennis-like games have not been discovered,
but a few Arabic words dating from ancient Egyptian times are

2012 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

The net was still five feet high at the sides, a carryover from the
games indoor ancestor, and the service boxes were 26 feet deep,
but by 1882, the specifications had evolved to their current form.

Boca Raton, Florida, May 10-11, 2012

2:15 to manually pick up 85 balls. It was thus determined that the

player would take 2 minutes to pick up all the balls after using the
full capacity of tennis ball machine.

Hence, it shows that according to the available technology, a

player will spend approximately 35% of time collecting tennis
balls instead of playing. The delay also leads to long annoying and
tiring breaks and increases the match time considerably making
the players more tired.

3. CONCEPTUAL DESIGNS
Employing humans to collect balls from around the tennis court is
generally done while playing a professional match but is not
feasible for players while training because it will be costly.
Various projects have been performed by students in colleges to
find a solution for collecting balls around the tennis court. They
have used the knowledge of Robotics to build robots which could
perform the required tasks. Listed below are a few examples of
the projects that were done for collecting the tennis balls.

3.1 Vacuum Cleaner Type Collector

A tennis ball collector was designed on the principle of a vacuum
cleaner. The handling is simple for any person. The capacity of
the collector is up to 200 balls.

Figure 1: Early field-tennis

Tennis balls must conform to certain criteria for weight, size,
deformation and bounce criteria to be approved for regulation
play. According to the International Tennis federation (ITF) the
official diameter of the tennis ball is approximately 6.7 cm (2.63
in.) and weight is around 57 gms. It is generally bright green in
color. To modify their aerodynamic properties they are covered in
a fluffy fibrous felt. A ball is tested for bounce by dropping it
from a height of 100 inches (2.54 m) onto concrete; a bounce
between 53 and 58 inches (1.3462 - 1.4732 m) is acceptable (if
taking place at sea-level and 20C / 68F; high-altitude balls have
different characteristics when tested at sea-level). Modern
regulation tennis balls are kept under pressure (approximately two
atmospheres) until initially used.
Professional tennis matches can generally last for more than 3
hours with a rest period of little more than 10 minutes between
sets. Training for such endurance matches becomes difficult
without a partner of adequate skills hence tennis players use
automatic ball launching machines to train without a partner. An
automatic ball launching machine that holds 100 balls will launch
balls at an average rate of 10 balls every 29 seconds. Therefore,
the total time the machine can last without the need to refill would
be

Figure 2: Conceptual design 1

3.2 Eagnas Roller Ball Collector

Eagnas roller ball collector is a simple and effective way of
quickly and easily gathering up tennis balls from the tennis court.
As it is rolled along the balls pop up through the bars and get into
the barrel section.

Hence the maximum time that a tennis player can play with an
automatic ball machine is around 4minutes and 50 seconds. After
this, the player will have to stop to collect around the tennis court
using a bottom loading basket. This is a stressful and time
consuming procedure which is generally despised by avid players.
By experimenting it was shown that it would take in an area of

2012 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

Once all the balls are collected the collector is up-ended and sits
upon the handle. A locking pin can then be used to prevent the
barrel from turning and a section of the barrel hinges opens as a
door.

Boca Raton, Florida, May 10-11, 2012

3.4 Ballbot Project

BallBot Project by Dominic Ford consists of a microcontroller
which captures frames from camera on board the robot, analyses
them, locates objects which look like tennis balls, navigates to
them and collects them. After collecting all the balls around the
court, it dumps all the balls in the assigned location.

Figure 3: Conceptual design 2

3.3 Bear Claw Collector

There have been several products which are introduced in the
market in order to collect the tennis balls. Robots have been
designed to collect balls from around the tennis court. Bear claw
tennis ball collector has been designed by students at Berkeley
University which uses a camera with color tracking that navigates
to tennis ball and uses the mechanical claw to grab the ball, lift it
and put in the onboard basket.
Figure 5: Conceptual design 4

4. PROPOSED DESIGN
When we decided that our final project would be a robotic tennis
ball collector we had several ideas on the concept and the design.
After trying to incorporate every important aspect of the different
designs we considered we came up with our ideal design. The
ideal design would be something as described here on. It would
have an RC platform with the cavity or enclosure for storing the
tennis balls underneath it.
The enclosure would have a one way valve which would act as a
restriction offering motion of the balls only in one direction hence
not allowing the balls to fall out once they were forced into the
cavity or enclosure. The enclosure would have RC controlled
gates in front of it which would open and close forcing the balls
that are in its reach into the cavity. The RC platform would be
able to charge using a charging pad which works on the principle
of inductive charging. Due to the constraints of time and fiscal
inputs we had to modify the design to something that would be
more feasible. The final design had the enclosure in front of it in
the form of a box made out of Styrofoam backed with very thin
plywood layer to add strength.
The RC controller for the gates had to different than the remote
for the RC platform. In the ideal design it would be replaced with
just a button on the controller for the platform since that is what
its essential function is, to act as a switch. Also we had to scale
the whole design down to be used for smaller sized Nerf balls
instead of tennis balls. At the end of the day as a team we were
satisfied with the prototype for the project as it showed our
potential design and validated its feasibility.

Figure 4: Conceptual design 3

2012 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

Boca Raton, Florida, May 10-11, 2012

Figure 7: RC microcontroller

5.2 Gate Controlling Circuit

In order to build a circuit that would control the open/close gate, a
Boe-Bot circuit board was used. The Boe-Bot circuit board must
receive and interpret signals that would be coming from the RC
circuit. Since the Boe-Bot does not interpret negative voltage a
ULN2030A transistor array had to be used. This chip uses 5 VDC
to power it, same as Boe-Bot circuit board. When the node on the
left is given 5 VDC the node directly to its right will drop to 0
volts and when the node is grounded to 0 VDC the respective
node will produce 5 VDC. The nodes are paired off horizontally 2
to 17, 3 to 16 and 4 to 15 continuing in this order. Using our 0
VDC ground as VSS we can produce a drop in the Boe-Bots
circuit board Pine #1 and #2 by grounding the node between the
resisters to VSS.

Figure 6: Prototype of the proposed design

5. BUILDING THE PROTOTYPE

A miniature scale prototype was built, assembled, and tested. For
demonstration purposes the prototype utilizes an RC platform.
The building process was divided into four major steps:

Remote control circuit

Gate controlling circuit
Ball cavity enclosure
Actuators operated gate

5.1 Remote Control Circuit

To build a remote control circuit, a microcontroller out of a
broken helicopter was used (Figure 01). The microcontroller
outputs were identified. There were two sets of outputs, the left
trigger uses a common ground (IO2) with one node that goes from
0 to 5 VDC (IO1) and the other goes from 0 to -5 VDC (IO3). As
the remote control throttle is increase from the lowered position to
the top position the voltage from IO1 and IO3 increase from 0,
being the lowest position, to 5 VDC and -5 VDC respectively.
IO2 and IO1 are then connected to a relay in our transition phase.
The relay named K2 uses 5 VDC to activate a contact that
connects the two lower legs. When activated our Vss is then
allowed to ground out the center of the two resistors, giving us a
low value.
The right trigger uses a different circuit due to the changes in the
circuit in the helicopter micro controller. The controller has two
pins, IO4 and IO5, for the right stick. When in the neutral position
(middle position) both IO4 and IO5 will give 0 VDC. When the
controller is moved into the lower position we will get IO4 at 0
VDC and IO5 at 5 VDC. Finally when the controller is moved in
the upward position we get IO4 at 5 VDC while IO5 is at 0 VDC.

Figure 8: Gate circuit and circuit diagram

2012 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

Boca Raton, Florida, May 10-11, 2012

5.3 Ball-Cavity Enclosure

5.4 Actuators-Operated Gate

A rectangular shape box was designed and built to resemble the

ball-collecting enclosure. The box has an open frontend and its
dimensions were carefully considered such that it will not restrict
the front wheels motion of the RC vehicle (Table 01). The weight
of the box was also taken into consideration. IT has to be
adequate, light enough to be moved around by the RC vehicle, yet
rigid enough to withstand mounted actuators and prevent any
possible collapse. The box interior was made out of foam board
and the exterior was made out of lightwood board for
reinforcement. The ball-collecting enclosure was double coated
for surface protection and mounted to the frontend of the RC
vehicle with 5mm ground clearance to ensure smooth maneuver
and operation. Width length height dimension inches

Servo- actuator gate was designed and built. The gate consists of
two open/close claws that would push the ball inside the cavity
via remote control. Claws dimensions were carefully selected
(Table 02); one claw is longer than the other to insure necessary
force required to push the ball all the way in. The shorter claw
acts as a bull-guide to prevent balls from slipping away upon
collection. The claw frame was made out of aluminum to
minimize the weight without compromising the needed rigidity
and strength (Figure 10). The claw body was made out of
Styrofoam for easy mold and mount. The claws were double
coated for proper protection and functionality. The assembly was
connected to the actuator servos and mounted on the ball-cavity
walls.
Table 2: Claws dimensions

Table 1: Ball-cavity dimensions

Gate-Claws Dimensions "cm"

Ball-Cavity Enclosure

Left Claw

Right Claw

Dimension

cm

Length

14

Length

11.5

Height

Width

16.5

Thickness

0.5

0.5

Height

Figure 9: Balls cavity enclosure

2012 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

Figure 10: Gate-claws assembly

Boca Raton, Florida, May 10-11, 2012

6. PROGRAM ALGORITHM

still:

Two circuits were built to operate the open/close claws via remote
control. The first circuit (RC-circuit) receives analog signal from
the remote control unit and convert them into binaries via
microcontroller and ULN2030A transistor array. The output
binaries are transferred to the second circuit (Gate-circuit) inputs
through ULN2030A transistor. The RC circuit receives continues
5 VDC thus its output remains 1 unless the circuit is tripped which
leads to 0 VSS. A very high resistor was used in order to trip the
RC circuit when the stick of the remote control unit is pushed UP.
Gate-circuit input (P1) controls the status of the left and right
actuators (P14 and P15). When the input is 1 (5 VDC) the gate
remain close, and when the circuit is tripped the input would be 0
(VSS) thus the gate would open for 3 seconds enabling the user to
position the RC platform in the proper place to collect the ball.

FOR counter = 1 TO 5
PULSOUT 14, 750
PULSOUT 15, 750
PAUSE 100
NEXT
RETURN

7. CONCLUSION
A prototype of the proposed Robotic Tennis Ball Collector was
successfully built. The design utilizes a remote control platform
and integrates it with two other circuits. The first circuit receives
analog signal from the remote control unit and transfer it to a
binary through microcontroller and transistor. The second circuit
receives the binary signal to control the open/close claws of the
balls cavity enclosure. The prototype demonstrates the ability to
maneuver easily and avoid obstacles along the way.

A short and simple program code was made using PBASIC. To

control the RC output two conditional statements were made and
each would run certain subroutines.
12-

If the input port is activated, the gate claws remain still.

If the input port is deactivated, the gate claws open for
three seconds and then close.

The prototype displays minimum human intervention with the

task on hand. However, there is still room for further
improvements. The objective of the proposed design is to have a
fully autonomous robotic platform to execute the task of tennisball-collecting. With more time and more available resources, the
objective will be met. Furthermore, the model may incorporates
some extra high-tech features such as ball weight and/or pressure
check that will enable the R.T.B.C to distinguish between valid
and invalid tennis balls.

The code details are as follows:

Table 3: Sample Code
'R.T.B.C.
' {$STAMP BS2}
' {$PBASIC 2.5}
counter VAR Word
DEBUG ? IN1

8. REFERENCES

IF IN1= 0 THEN Open

IF IN1= 1 THEN still

[1] Heiner Gillmeister, Tennis: A Cultural History, Leicester

University Press, London, England, 1998.
[2] Lus Fernando Costa Pacheco, Andr Joaquim Barbosa de
Oliveira, Antnio Fernando Macedo Ribeiro, Mobile Robot
for Autonomous Golf Balls Picking , University of Minho,
Guimaraes, Portugal, 2008.

END
'Subroutines'
Open:
FOR counter = 1 TO 5
PULSOUT 14, 750
PULSOUT 15, 850
PAUSE 100
NEXT

' Number of pulses.

' Reight Stand still.
' Left servo full speed ccw.

[3] Justin Ellis , Tony Morelli, Amandeep Sohal, Autonomous

Mobile Robots , University of Nevada, Reno, 2005.

' Number of pulses.

' Right servo stand still.
' Left servo full speed cw.

[4] Johnathon Schultz, Peter Clain, Jesse Miner, Wall-E

Robot, Final Report, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York,
2010.
[5] Ryan Collier, Mohammed Adham, Perry Haldenby, Kevin
Smith, Autonomous Tennis Ball Collector, Design Report,
University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2009.

FOR counter = 1 TO 40
PULSOUT 14, 750
PULSOUT 15, 750
PAUSE 100
NEXT

[6] Kevin Dluzen, Jonathan Hall, Diyang Qiu, PV Autonomous

Golf Ball Retriever, University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign, 2012.
[7] Rodrigo Andres Barbosa, Karina Chang, ,Luxon Laborieux ,
Juan Zuluaga, Self-Piloted Tennis Ball Collector, Final
Report, Florida International University, Miami, Florida,
2008.

FOR counter = 1 TO 6
PULSOUT 14,750
PULSOUT 15,650
PAUSE 75
NEXT
RETURN

2012 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

Boca Raton, Florida, May 10-11, 2012