Automated Tennis
Group 14
Project
In almost all sports there’s a person with the role of calling scores, outs, fouls, etc. The person should be neutral and unbiased. While this is not always the case, there’s a further difficulty with this, human’s using their senses to make high-speed accurate calls can be unreliable. For this reason more and more sports have adopted technology to improve the accuracy of decision making, or to confirm calls in the case of a contested call by a player or coach. In tennis, line judges are expected to watch each line of the court at all times and determine accurately exactly where a tennis ball traveling at averages up to sixty miles per hour lands at that line. It goes without saying that a human will have errors in accomplishing this task.
With recent leaps in technology, something unfathomable such as replacing all human staff in a sport has become possible. While the principle of automation has been implemented throughout the manufacturing industry, it has not found its way so much into sports. The goal of this project is to demonstrate the plausibility of automating the sports industry, especially tennis.
The following flow chart is the block diagram of our system:
Group
Group Members from Left to Right:
Khoa Hoang (CS), Kyle Willnow (CpE), Michael Rathbun (EE), Aviel Yashar (EE)
Khoa Hoang is graduating in the Spring of 2017 with a degree in computer science. He enjoys a hardware based approach in researching embedded devices and has disclosed numerous vulnerabilities in various set-top boxes and "smart" devices. He is currently listed on various “Security Hall of Fame” pages for successful bug bounty submissions including AT&T, Samsung and Roku.
Kyle Willnow is graduating in the Spring of 2017 with a degree in computer engineering. He is interested in digital hardware and computer architecture design. After graduation, he is moving to Colorado to work for Lockheed Martin as an Embedded Software Engineer.
Aviel Yashar is graduating in the Spring of 2017 with a degree in electrical engineering. After graduation, he is moving to Texas to work for TI as a product marketing engineer
Michael Rathbun is graduating in the Spring of 2017 with a degree in electrical engineering. After graduation, he is planning on continuing his studies as a graduate student in power engineering.
Videos
The following video depicts the operation of the image processing and scoring system. Each video stream represents one head of a stereo camera, and points are plotted on the streams to indicate the location of the ball. After triangulation, if it was determined that the ball bounced, the location and impacts on scoring are printed in the terminal at right.