An Intelligent Tennis Ball Collecting Vehicle Using Smart Phone Touch-Based Interface

Tennis is an interesting racket sport played by millions of recreational and professional players and is also a very popular worldwide spectator sport. Players ranging from the beginners to the professionals usually require a lot of practices. At the end of such practices, the tennis balls are usually scattered randomly over the surface of the tennis court, hence, it is time consuming and annoying to retrieve the balls one-by-one manually. Traditional tennis collectors mostly focus on providing the player with a more efficient tool to shorten the pick-up time, however, it still requires a lot of efforts for the player to collect the tennis balls. In this paper, we proposed a novel tennis ball collecting vehicle. Unlike traditional labour taking tennis ball collectors, our new collector, combining an intelligent vehicle with a wheeler-based tennis ball collector, can either be interactively controlled by an Android smart phone through the Bluetooth communication or automatically collect tennis balls along a predetermined route with collision detection and avoidance. Furthermore, through the Android touch-based user interface, our system provides a more interesting and user-friendly remote control solution for tennis ball collection.