Development of table tennis ball shooting machine with four rollers

Abstract

Up to now, it is still difficult to shoot a table tennis ball in high speeds accompany with designated vertical, horizontal and gyroscopic spins using a commercial table tennis robot (i.e. table tennis machine). Accordingly, we designed and produced a table tennis machine, which can shoot the table tennis ball with a variety of shooting types (e.g. loop, smash, drive, knuckle, chiquita flick). The produced machine has four rollers (two launch rollers and two gyro rollers), where the rotation number and rotation direction of each roller can be adjusted independently. In this study, we perform shooting tests of the developed table tennis machine to evaluate its performance and to study the ball shooting mechanism. From the experimental results, the developed machine has high power to shoot a table tennis ball with maximum speeds over 42 m/s, maximum spin rate over 7,800 rpm accompany with designated spin types (top, back, side, or gyro). Moreover, the direction of the spin axis of the shot ball can be controlled freely within 360 degrees by adjusting the two gyro rollers.