K. Lee, A. Achhammer, S. Drexler, and D. Wollherr Institute of Automatic Control Engineering,Technische Universitat Munchen , Munich, 80290 Germany(E-mail: k.lee@ieee.org)VIDEO ABSTRACTBuilding a basketball robot is a recently launched projectat the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering (LSR)for investigating fast manipulation with non-negligible dy-namics and changing contact situation. This video presentssome preliminary results of the project which is balancinga basketball on a plate. An aluminium plate of which thesize is 25 40 cm is mounted on the end-e ector of asix degree of freedom (DoF) serial industrial robot StaubliRX90. In order to update the current state of a basketballon the plate the robot is equipped with a 6 DoF force-torque sensor between the plate and the end-e ector. Themass of the basketball is 0 :6 kg.Standard control of industrial robots is inappropriate fortesting complex control algorithms. A possible solutionto create a rapid prototyping test environment is to runthe system with Matlab/Simulink, see Wollherr et al.(2003). Fig. 1 describes the hardware con guration usedin this experiment with an additional PC, on whichMatlab/Simulink is executed under realtime Linux (RTAI)environment. It is integrated with sensoray cards anda force-torque sensor receiver. Advantages of using thishardware con guration are that new control algorithmscan be designed easily in Matlab/Simulink and executed inthe realtime Linux environment while keeping signi cantsafety measures such as motor brakes, supervising jointlimits and speeds as well as emergency brake from theoriginal system.The overall control scheme for the balancing a basket-ball consists of three parts including balancing control,impedance control, and inner position control. When thebasketball loses its equilibrium on the plate and startsmoving, velocity and position of the basketball are esti-mated by force-torque sensor data and the correspondingdesired trajectory for stabilizing the ball is generated inthe balancing control. The inner impedance control issupposed to take out the kinetic energy from the ball and