A Robotic Ballcatcher (Work during Udo Frese's time at the DLR)

I am ultimately fascinated by the idea of robots taking part in sport activities. The probably most well known example is the robot soccer competition RoboCup. Personally during my time at the German Aerospace Center I was involved in a different ball game.

At the Hannover Fair (2000, 2002) we showed a demonstration where the newly developed DLR lightweight arm and the new DLR hand caught a ball thrown by someone at the robot. Click on the images below to see a video from our lab experiments:

More detailed information is found in our IROS 2001 paper.