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Hexa-Bouncer may be the most over-the-top feat of engineering you’ll see this week. The setup is considerably more complex than expected. [T-Kuhn] has unveiled his robot called the “hexa-bouncer,” which solves a task as simple as bouncing a ball through excessive engineering, and the motors in the Stewart platform-based mechanism can move a ping-pong paddle independently along every rotational and translational axis.
The system operates with four components.
Teensy figures
Six stepper motors connected to planetary gearboxes provide the motion in the mechanism. While two cameras capture the image, a Teensy 4.0 and a PC equipped with a GPU complete the control infrastructure.
The Teensy coordinates the motors. The actual commands come from the PC, which runs a Unity application published on GitHub, and the application tracks the ball in three dimensions using the two cameras to calculate inverse kinematics.
Kuhn measurements
The body is largely made of aluminum machined on [T-Kuhn]’s CNC machine; the developer machined 27 parts for each arm and produced more than 300 parts in total. The method has been used before. The developer had previously used the ball-tracking method in the octo-bounce robot as well. The site described the robot, which performs an ordinary ball-bouncing task, as the most extreme engineering product of the week.