A Table Tennis Robot System Using an Industrial KUKA Robot Arm

摘要

In recent years robotic table tennis has become a popular research challenge for image processing and robot control. Here we present a novel table tennis robot system with high accuracy vision detection and fast robot reaction. Our system is based on an industrial KUKA Agilus R900 sixx robot with 6 DOF. Four cameras are used for ball position detection at 150 fps. We employ a multiple-camera calibration method, and use iterative triangulation to reconstruct the 3D ball position with an accuracy of 2.0 mm. In order to detect the flying ball with higher velocities in real-time, we combine color and background thresholding. For predicting the ball's trajectory we test both a curve fitting approach and an extended Kalman filter. Our robot is able to play rallies with a human counting up to 50 consequential strokes and has a general hitting rate of 87%.