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Figure 1: Toy Basketball Shooter
Problem Statement:
For our project, we have decided to build a basketball shooting toy that would be able to shoot from different distances and angles. Some complexities that arise in trying to solve this problem is getting precise motion control over the trajectory of the ball. Since we want the shot path to look like an actual basketball to get the desired motion of the ball we will need both rotational and translational motion which can't be created through simple joints. Another challenge will be generating the quick snap of the ball at the end of the shot to get a more realistic motion. For this we will need to be able to control the force and speed input into the linkage throughout the motion of the linkages and not just the initial input. Since we want to automatically reload the mechanism we also need to consider a system that can reload the shooter without interfering with any current motion occurring. This is so that if multiple balls are waiting to be shot it doesn't reload while another ball is in motion or not yet been shot.
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