Predicting trajectories of golf balls using recurrent neural networks

Abstract: This thesis is concerned with the problem of predicting the remaining part of the trajectory of a golf ball as it travels through the air where only the three-dimensional position of the ball is captured. The approach taken to solve this problem relied on recurrent neural networks in the form of the long short-term memory networks (LSTM). The motivation behind this choice was that this type of networks had led to state-of-the-art performance for similar problems such as predicting the trajectory of pedestrians. The results show that using LSTMs led to an average reduction of 36.6 % of the error in the predicted impact position of the ball, compared to previous methods based on numerical simulations of a physical model, when the model was evaluated on the same driving range that it was trained on. Evaluating the model on a different driving range than it was trained on leads to improvements in general, but not for all driving ranges, in particular when the ball was captured at a different frequency compared to the data that the model was trained on. This problem was solved to some extent by retraining the model with small amounts of data on the new driving range.