Robot Eyes Track Ping Pong Balls

 Robots

The Ishikawa Oku Laboratory from the University of Tokyo has developed a high speed sensing system.  In a newly released video the  1,000-frames-per-second camera uses a pan-tilt system to track a ping pong ball. The device is so fast it can always keep the ball in the center of the frame.

Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa from the University of Tokyo and his research associates have developed a 1,000-frames-per-second high speed sensor system that can track pan-tilt camera to track a ping pong ball. The device is so fast it can always keep the ball in the centre of the frame.

Professor Ishikawa says they made the video because their earlier clip showing a robot hand that plays (and always wins at) rock-paper-scissors "lacked enough technical details" and wasn't satisfying for robotics researchers.

One potential application of the technology may be to film sporting events.  It is often hard for camera operators to keep tracking a ball or puck while filming. In such cases, shootable method has been limited to either moving the camera's gaze slowly with wide angle of view, or controlling the gaze not accuratly but based on a prediction and adopting some parts which are shot well by chance. Super slow and close-up videos of the remarkable player or the ball are thought to be especially quite valuable. However, camera operators have not been able to do that.

To solve this issue, Ishikawa's team developed "1ms Auto Pan-Tilt" technology. This technology can automatically control the camera's Pan-Tilt angles to keep an object always at the center of field, just like "autofocus" keeps an object in focus. Even a high-speed object like a bouncing pingpong ball in play can be tracked at the center due to a high-speed optical gaze controller Saccade Mirror and a 1000-fps high-speed vision. The Saccade Mirror controls a camera's gazing direction not by moving the camera itself but by rotating two-axis small galvanometer mirrors. It controls the gaze by 60 deg, the widest angle, for both pan and tilt. And steering the gaze by 40 deg takes only 3.5 ms. The newest prototype system accesses a Full HD image quality for an actual broadcasting service.

Other possibilities of  the system potentially are recording dynamics of a flying bird, or insects. Linked with robotic systems is also a very valuable potential application, as was demonstrated in the rock-paper-scissors demonstrations.






SOURCE  IEEE Spectrum, Ishikawa Oku Laboratory

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