Design and development of a novel type of table tennis aerial robot player with tilting propellers

Abstract

Table tennis has long fascinated roboticists as a particularly difficult task which requires fast movements, accurate control and adaptation to task parameters. In addition, the development of such devices is useful for educating the undergraduate students. Up to now, several groups have developed robotic manipulators playing table tennis and other commercial interactive robots. Moreover, drones are booming right now, and they can cover a larger workspace than manipulators, for a lower device volume and at a lower price. In this context, this paper aims to propose a drone playing table tennis to analyze the benefits and the disadvantages for this task. Most vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicles are not fast enough to reproduce hitting motions. The proposed prototype is an innovative quadrotor combining a tilting propeller and a state-dependent iterative linear quadratic control (iLQR). The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated with real experiments that show the success of the approach, reaching hitting rates of 40%.