AIMY: An Open-source Table Tennis Ball Launcher for Versatile and High-fidelity Trajectory Generation

TL;DR

AIMY is an open-source, versatile table tennis ball launcher capable of generating high-fidelity trajectories with adjustable speed, spin, and orientation, facilitating advanced robot training and research.

Contribution

The paper introduces AIMY, a novel open-hardware and open-source ball launcher with precise control and high-performance capabilities for robot table tennis research.

Findings

Achieves ball speeds up to 15.4 m/s and spins of 192 s^-1.

Provides fully controllable launch parameters via Ethernet/Wi-Fi.

Demonstrates accurate targeting and trajectory control for training applications.

Abstract

To approach the level of advanced human players in table tennis with robots, generating varied ball trajectories in a reproducible and controlled manner is essential. Current ball launchers used in robot table tennis either do not provide an interface for automatic control or are limited in their capabilities to adapt speed, direction, and spin of the ball. For these reasons, we present AIMY, a three-wheeled open-hardware and open-source table tennis ball launcher, which can generate ball speeds and spins of up to 15.4 ms-1 and 192 s-1, respectively, which are comparable to advanced human players. The wheel speeds, launch orientation and time can be fully controlled via an open Ethernet or Wi-Fi interface. We provide a detailed overview of the core design features, as well as open source the software to encourage distribution and duplication within and beyond the robot table tennis research community. We also extensively evaluate the ball launcher's accuracy for different system settings and learn to launch a ball to desired locations. With this ball launcher, we enable long-duration training of robot table tennis approaches where the complexity of the ball trajectory can be automatically adjusted, enabling large-scale real-world online reinforcement learning for table tennis robots.