Mousebuster: A Robot System for Catching Fast Moving Objects by Vision

In this paper we describe a control methodology for catching a fast moving object with a robot manipulator, where visual information is employed to track the trajectory of the target. Sensing, planning and control are performed in real-time to cope with possible unpredictable trajectory changes of the moving target, and prediction techniques are adopted to compensate the time delays introduced by visual processing and by the robot controller. A simple but reliable model of the robot controller has been taken into account in the control architecture for improving the performance of the system. Experimental results have shown that the robot system is capable of tracking and catching an object moving on a plane at velocities of up to 700 mm/s and accelerations of up to 1500 mm/s2.