Precision Ball Launcher

Fall 2024 - Machine Intelligence Lab - NaviGator AMS - GitHub

Challenge

During the Fall 2024 semester, my primary project at the University of Florida’s Machine Intelligence Lab (MIL) was to create a racquetball launcher from scratch.

The ball launcher needed to be created for the RobotX 2024 Maritime Challenge, where our labs’ large Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV), NaviGator, would compete against colleges from around the world to autonomously complete a series of challenges.

For the ball launcher task, the robot would have to autonomously position itself in front of a target, where it could then fling the balls into a hole.

Solution

This challenge had been attempted when my lab previously competed in RobotX in 2022, however the design had been ineffective. The previous solution was a series of slingshots that were actuated by servos moving a small arm to launch the racquetball. This solution was inaccurate, difficult to reload, and prone to failures.

To rectify these failures for the 2024 iteration of the challenge, I redesigned the ball launcher from the ground up. I chose to use a flywheel based system because of its relatively low complexity and improved accuracy compared to the slingshot device. Another possible solution was to use a pneumatic system, similar to at t-shirt cannon, however with the short development time available (about 2 months) it was deemed that adding pneumatics to the robot would add unnecessary complexity.

The resulting flywheel based solution in composed of just two primary components:

  1. A main chassis that maintains the relationship between the path of the ball and the flywheel, while holding the motor and being attached to the aluminum extruded mount.

  2. A small servo-actuated mechanism that releases racquetballs one at a time based on carefully designed geometry.

This flywheel went through three major iterations before arriving to the final design that maximized effectiveness while minimizing component complexity. The final design achieved an accuracy of ±8” from a distance of ~15 feet, while requiring only 8 parts custom parts, all of which could be 3D printed in less than 3 hours.

A full SolidWorks CAD of the ball launcher is available at my GitHub, and I would be happy to answer any questions about this project via email or linkedIn.