Athletic Mobile Manipulator System for Robotic Wheelchair Tennis

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first open-source autonomous robot designed for regulation wheelchair tennis, demonstrating its capabilities and establishing a baseline for future research in human-scale robotic sports.

Contribution

It presents a complete, reproducible system for wheelchair tennis robots, addressing key challenges in robotics for sports and inspiring further research in this domain.

Findings

Successfully executes ground strokes in wheelchair tennis

Provides a comprehensive evaluation of hardware and software components

Establishes a baseline for future robotic sports research

Abstract

Athletics are a quintessential and universal expression of humanity. From French monks who in the 12th century invented jeu de paume, the precursor to modern lawn tennis, back to the K'iche' people who played the Maya Ballgame as a form of religious expression over three thousand years ago, humans have sought to train their minds and bodies to excel in sporting contests. Advances in robotics are opening up the possibility of robots in sports. Yet, key challenges remain, as most prior works in robotics for sports are limited to pristine sensing environments, do not require significant force generation, or are on miniaturized scales unsuited for joint human-robot play. In this paper, we propose the first open-source, autonomous robot for playing regulation wheelchair tennis. We demonstrate the performance of our full-stack system in executing ground strokes and evaluate each of the system's hardware and software components. The goal of this paper is to (1) inspire more research in human-scale robot athletics and (2) establish the first baseline for a reproducible wheelchair tennis robot for regulation singles play. Our paper contributes to the science of systems design and poses a set of key challenges for the robotics community to address in striving towards robots that can match human capabilities in sports.