Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Athletics are a quintessential and universal expression of humanity. From French monks who in the$12{\text{th}}$century inventedjeu de paume, the precursor to modern lawn tennis, back to theK'iche'people who played the Maya Ballgame as a form of religious expression over three thousand years ago, humans have sought to train their minds and bodies to excel in sporting contests. Advances in robotics are opening up the possibility of robots in sports. Yet, key challenges remain, as most prior works in robotics for sports are limited to pristine sensing environments, do not require significant force generation, or are on miniaturized scales unsuited for joint human-robot play. In this letter, we propose the first open-source, autonomous robot for playing regulation wheelchair tennis. We demonstrate the performance of our full-stack system in executingground strokesand evaluate each of the system's hardware and software components. The goal of this letter is to (1) inspire more research in human-scale robot athletics and (2) establish the first baseline for a reproducible wheelchair tennis robot for regulation singles play. Our paper contributes to the science of systems design and poses a set of key challenges for the robotics community to address in striving towards robots that can match human capabilities in sports.
Authors: Zulfiqar Zaidi, Daniel Martin, Nathaniel Belles, Viacheslav Zakharov, Arjun Krishna, Kin Man Lee, Peter Wagstaff, Sumedh Naik, Matthew Sklar, Sugju Choi, Yoshiki Kakehi, Ruturaj Patil, Divya Mallemadugula, Florian Pesce, Peter Wilson, Wendell Hom, Matan Diamond, Bryan Zhao, Nina Moorman, Rohan Paleja, Letian Chen, Esmaeil Seraj, Matthew Gombolay
Institution: Georgia Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Control and Systems Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Georgia Institute of Technology
OpenAlex ID: W4323825041