An Arduino Based Ball Juggling Robot That Bounces and Balances Ping Pong Balls With Great Control

Electrical engineer Tobias Kuhn of Electron Dust, who previously used four microphones to keep a PID controlled ping pong ball bouncing on a plate machine, updated his experiment with the Octo-Bouncer.

This Arduino controlled flatbed ball juggling robot uses a microcontroller and stepper motors to ensure that ball always stays in balance and in motion with machine 3D calculation.

I started thinking about ball juggling machines in the year 2015. I wrote about my first few attempts at creating them in this blog post from the year 2017. In 2018 I wrote another post about my then newest build. We’re now in the year 2020. And finally, the quest to get a machine to juggle a ping pong ball reliably has come to an end (as this current build is able to keep the ball bouncing for hours.)… The machine calculates the ball’s 3D position from the image processing data and uses this information to control the orange ping pong ball.