Design and Development of Automatic Tennis Ball Collector

Tennis players frequently practice from one side of the court without an opponent on the other side to return by hitting many balls. During practice sessions, personally collecting the balls took more time. The aim of this project is to design and construct a tennis ball-collection robot that can automatically gather the balls from one half of the court, releasing the player to rest rather than physically collecting the balls. This work includes a detailed design, a background data, prototypes, and concept models. We developed a novel autonomous or semiautonomous mobile robot for the purpose of gathering tennis balls for our capstone project. Two independently operating wheels help the robot move, while a castor serves to stabilize it. Tennis balls are pushed into a basket on top of the robot by a rotating brush, which serves as the novel collection mechanism. The drum spins with the help of a motor at a speed that has been confirmed through trial. To ensure that the adopted concepts and conceptual designs are practical and solid, three subsequent functional prototypes have been conceived, constructed, and tested. Tennis players can also use Arduino programming to direct the robot to move and collect the balls if it is unable to locate, identify, and gather tennis balls on its own. All tennis balls on the court will be recognized and localized in future using global cameras and a centralized image-processing system. Furthermore, it is believed that this system will handle navigation for mobile robots as well as path planning for the best possible outcome.