ROBOTIC BALL RETRIEVING : A METHOD TO DETECT, COLLECT AND RETRIEVE A BALL

Abstract: The aim of the presented thesis is to examine the potential of an autonomous football handling machine. It has been noted that the number of machines with the purpose of autonomously handling footballs, tennis balls, golf balls etc. are increasing but that no such machine is yet well established on the market. The performance of a robot that can both find, collect and retrieve a ball to a fix position is being examined. An area where the machine is intended to fill a purpose is for example penalty or free kick practice within football, where a single player stands relatively far away from goal and the ball does not necessarily bounce back to the player after scoring. Such a robot could make practice more efficient by relieving the player from the repetitive task of running back and forth to the goal, hence providing him/her with the flexibility of practicing alone. The results of the study show that ultrasound is not an effective technique for detecting a football, because of many reasons. One of the reasons is that the ultrasonic sensor doesn’t measure distance accurately enough when dealing with spherical surfaces. However, since the developed demonstrator is tested in a fixed setting, its success rate is high. With a few adjustment, the system as a whole shows high potential. The main recommendation for future work is to replace the ultrasonic sensor with a camera, and implementation of feedback control, for the steering of the robots movements.