Watch a Robot Juggle a Ping Pong Ball

Ping pong is a fun sport whose level of seriousness seems to vary greatly depending on who is playing. On the other hand, if you’re Tobias Kuhn, table tennis is apparently not so much a competition between two rivals as it is an interesting robotic challenge to keep a ball bouncing on a paddle.

His bot — as documented in this Let’s Make Robots article — has gone through several iterations, including one using sound detection. The method that he ended up with (so far) uses a paddle suspended by three stepper-driven pulleys, and is controlled by a Raspberry Pi 2 along with an Arduino Uno.

Using a camera module, the bot calculates the position of the ball in space at 90 frames per second and reacts using PID (proportional-integral-derivative) control to keep the little ball happily bouncing away!