Design and motion control of a ping pong robot

A ping pong robot with 5 degree of freedoms is designed in this paper. It consists of a PC, a high speed stereovision system with two smart cameras, AC servo motors and step motors. The hitting task of the ping pong robot is divided into three stages: the measurement and prediction stage, the planning stage and the execution stage. In the planning stage, we propose series of methods to plan the paddle trajectory, paddle posture, hitting speed according to the hitting information. Experiments of the robot versus a person are well conducted. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the designed ping pong robot and the proposed methods.