Golf Practice Made Easy with Robotics

When you think of sports, you usually think of something that takes a lot of physical effort. Golf is a bit different. Sure, you can get some walking in if you don’t take a cart. But mostly golfing is about coordination and skill and less about physical exertion. Until you want to practice driving. You hit a bucket of balls and then you have to go walk around and pick them up. Unless you have help, of course. In particular, you can delegate the task to a robot.

The robot that [webzuweb] built looks a little like a plywood robot vacuum. However, instead of suction, it uses some plywood disks to lift the balls and deposit them in a hopper. The electronics consist of an Arduino and an Orange Pi Lite. A GPS tells the robot where it is and it develops a search pattern based on its location.

Although [webzuweb] notes he isn’t done with the project, it looks pretty good. He describes the software, but it doesn’t appear to be posted anywhere. However, he does describe its operation and how it changes mode based on its current state.

We can’t decide if golf is really a sport or more of a game. We were surprised to read that if you carry your own bag and don’t use a cart you can burn about 360 calories an hour which is somehow more than a gymnast burns, which hardly seems possible.

Of course, most people use a cart and a caddy, so they aren’t going to burn those calories. If you are in the market for a cool cart, we liked this one. Or, perhaps you’d like one with more power.

from Hackaday https://ift.tt/2MQ9Uk3
via IFTTT