Motion planning for catching a light-weight ball with high-speed visual feedback

High-speed manipulation has great potential to produce new robotic skills by exploiting the features of high-speed motion. The purpose of this study is to catch a lightweight ball with a high-speed hand-arm system and high-speed visual feedback. One of the main problems in catching a high-speed moving lightweight ball is that the ball easily bounces off the hand after hitting the hand. Therefore in this paper, we propose a catching strategy that reduces the relative velocity between the hand and the ball. We show experimental results of a high-speed manipulator catching a ball.