Seeking advice for an autonomous ping pong drone player

[radu07]

Hello everyone,

I made an autonomous ping pong drone player prototype during my master research .

Now it is able to return some balls thrown at it 40% of the time, in simulation it achieves 80%.

Do you think some people will be interested in that kind of product to buy to play ping pong against?

Also, what kind of team it will take to develop it from a prototype into a product and how much time?

Thanks for the feedback !

 

[LoneRCRanger]

Cool idea. Is the drone self powered? If so, the game could be a short one.

 

[radu07]

Yes it is, but we could implement a wired power supply in the future.

 

[Dugdog47]

Cool, build 2 make em play against each other. Sit back and watch hilarious antics ensue lol.

 

[wafflejock]

First off cool!

Secondly I think there are other ping pong playing bots usually just an arm though or other fixed mount and mechanism. I think the noise on a fix mounted system will be more manageable compared with a quad with all the high frequency noises/vibrations. The vision and planning remind me of skydio systems so maybe could get work with them or a similar company to further develop your work.

 

[LoneRCRanger]

we could implement a wired power supply in the future.

Wired means "wires", means weight, means change of aerodynamics, means complicated.

 

[wafflejock]

Yup agree, wires need to be thick to be low resistance and thick wire is heavy, if using thin wire need to use weaker motors which means less payload capabilities and or less agility too so all trade offs. Not saying impossible just seems not practical especially for the use case here (have seen others talk about using tethered power for surveillance which might make sense), here I think just case of "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail."