Basketball robot: Ball-On-Plate with pure haptic information

Building a basketball robot is a recently launched project at the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering (LSR) for investigating fast manipulation with non-negligible dynamics and changing contact situation. This study presents one of the main preliminary results of the project which is balancing a basketball on a plate using a six degrees of freedom serial industrial robot based on pure haptic information. The Ball-On-Plate system has been one of the classical applications of control theory and many studies have been conducted on this issue. However, most of these studies employed vision systems to update the current state of the ball on the plate. In this paper, the concept of balancing a ball on a plate purely based on haptic information is discussed. The velocity of the basketball which rolls on a plate is estimated based on the force data measured by a force-torque (F/T) sensor mounted on the end-effector and the proposed control scheme brings the basketball back to a still standing on the plate. Experimental results are presented to validate the efficiency of the proposed control scheme.