Hey Society of Robots members. First off, I apologize for all ignorance and incompetence ahead of time. I am a student in Mechanical Engineering and am working a project with a group of more mechanical engineers and we all suck at electronics. The project basically is, what the title implies, to track a rolling ball and launch some projectile at the ball. I have been trying to read up on different sensors and how each type works. I was showing a lot of interest in two sharp IR rangefinders to have one try and do a left edge and the other do a right edge finding. The problem I see with this is that we would like a range maybe between 5 feet and 50 feet. The target distance should be around 20 feet away but we would prefer a better range to work with. Maybe there is some optical system that could reach these distances? It would also be nice to be able to extrapolate the next few coordinates based on the previous trajectory. Again the ball should just be rolling be we are considering trying to write a code to plot trajectory so it could be use with a ball being tossed across the detector space. This would then be used to determine where to shoot. The speed of the ball is unknown but I'm estimating around 1 m/s. Any ideas and help will be awesome! I have all summer to work on this project but would like to get some good ideas going.
THANKS!!!
