Development of Air Hockey Robot with High-Speed Vision and High-Speed Wrist

Our research group has developed an air hockey robot with high-speed vision capable of visual recognition at 500 Hz, which exceeds that of humans. Although this robot uses high-speed vision to increase its reaction speed and improve its performance, it has a low speed to compete with humans because its hand speed is still not sufficiently fast. In this study, a high-speed wrist rotation mechanism using a direct drive motor was introduced to the air hockey robot to improve the hitting speed through the snapping motion of the wrist. Furthermore, we developed a hitting motion algorithm that utilizes high-speed visual feedback. The effectiveness of the proposed system was verified experimentally. The proposed system exhibits an improved motion performance.