Overview

Many studies on skillful human motions and animal movements have enriched robot functionalities as well as their performance. Inversely, struggles to transfer dexterous skills of human being to robots may also deepen the understanding and insight into human physiology itself.

In order to imitate highly evolved creatures, robotics researchers are facing many challenges from sensing to decision making, from design to actuation as well as control. Sports may be one of the most challenging tasks for robots as it requires fast, highly dextrous manipulation including non-negligible dynamics and variable contact situations, although most human beings can easily learn and enjoy it.

From these contexts, basketball robotics is a recently launched project at the LSR for investigating fast manipulation with non-negligible dynamics and changing contact situations.

Basketball robotics covers all major skills such as ball tracking and catching, target-oriented ball throwing/ passing, dexterous ball dribbling etc which are relevant in a real basketball game.

One major factor that imposes challenges on this project and makes it discriminable from the state of the art techniques in robot ball handling/ juggling is to employ a real basketball.

Due to the oversizing of a real basketball for robot grippers, all the above mentioned skills are to be executed without explicit ball grasping and thus a new paradigm of robot ball handling skill is to be developed.

 
Related Publications

• K.K. Lee, D. Wollherr, Basketball Robot: Ball-on-Plate with Pure Haptics, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA),  Pasadena, CA, USA, 2008
• K.K. Lee, A. Achhammer, S. Drexler, D. Wollherr, Basketball Robot: Ball-on-Plate Symtem without Visual Information, Proceedings of the IFAC World Congress, Seoul, Korea, 2008