A Biomimetic Approach to Robot Table Tennis - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

A Biomimetic Approach to Robot Table Tennis

Muelling, K., Kober, J., and Peters, J.
Conference Paper, Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 1921 - 1926, October, 2010

Abstract

Although human beings see and move slower than table tennis or baseball robots, they manage to outperform such robot systems. One important aspect of this better performance is the human movement generation. In this paper, we study trajectory generation for table tennis from a biomimetic point of view. Our focus lies on generating efficient stroke movements capable of mastering variations in the environmental conditions, such as changing ball speed, spin and position. We study table tennis from a human motor control point of view. To make headway towards this goal, we construct a trajectory generator for a single stroke using the discrete movement stages hypothesis and the virtual hitting point hypothesis to create a model that produces a human-like stroke movement. We verify the functionality of the trajectory generator for a single forehand stroke both in a simulation and using a real Barrett WAM™.

BibTeX

@conference{Muelling-2010-107894,
author = {Muelling, K. and Kober, J. and Peters, J.},
title = {A Biomimetic Approach to Robot Table Tennis},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
year = {2010},
month = {October},
pages = {1921 - 1926},
}