Machine Learning Robot Ball Boy

Introduction to the project

Ball kids spend most of a match standing still. We wanted to find out whether a small robot could do the job instead, using a camera and a model trained on footage of our own rallies.

The robot runs a lightweight object-detection model on a Raspberry Pi, tracks the ball from the moment it leaves the racket and plans a route to where it will stop. A soft scoop on the front collects it without stopping.