Ball's flight trajectory prediction for table-tennis game by humanoid robot

Abstract

To improve and validate the performance of humanoid robot, the research on a table-tennis game by both humanoid robots is supported by 863, the national hi-tech program. Due to the limitation of the visual feedback system and the motion ability of the humanoid robot, a precise model of the table-tennis game is necessary to predict the ball's trajectory. This paper details the dynamic model of the ball's flight trajectory as well as its parameters calibration by photron fastcam, a high speed camera with 2 kfps to capture the trajectory of ball. With the model's characteristics, ball's flight trajectory prediction based on a few observation points is employed as well as its noise sources are discussed. According to the requirement of table-tennis game by humanoid robot, a novel nonlinear observer is developed to improve the prediction accuracy. Finally, Experiments results with binocular vision show that the model and trajectory prediction proposed by the paper outperform the requirement of the game.