Accurate real-time ball trajectory estimation with onboard stereo camera system for humanoid ping-pong robot

In this paper, an accurate real-time ball trajectory estimation approach working on the onboard stereo camera system for the humanoid ping-pong robot has been presented. As the asynchronous observations from different cameras will great reduce the accuracy of the trajectory estimation, the proposed approach will main focus on increasing the estimation accuracy under those asynchronous observations via concerning the flying ball's motion consistency. The approximate polynomial trajectory model for the flying ball is built to optimize the best parameters from the asynchronous observations in each discrete temporal interval. The experiments show the proposed approach can performance much better than the method that ignores the asynchrony and can achieve the similar performance as the hardware-triggered synchronizing based method, which cannot be deployed in the real onboard vision system due to the limited bandwidth and real-time output requirement. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.