Racket Control for a Table Tennis Robot to Return a Ball

Abstract

This paper mainly proposes a racket control method for returning a table tennis ball to a desired position with a desired rotational velocity. The method determines the racket's state, i.e., the racket's striking posture and translational velocity by using two physical models: the racket rebound model and the aerodynamics model. The algorithm of determining the racket's state is derived by solving nonlinear equations and solving a two-point boundary value problem of a differential equation. But this is not suitable for a real-time process because of large computing time. The paper proposed a modified algorithm which could be used for a real-time process by introducing a simple aerodynamics model. Numerical simulations and experimental results show effectiveness of the proposed methods.