The Denso VS050 badminton robot built by Travis Mitchell grabs a shuttlecock from a hopper, feeds it into a pair of high-speed spinning wheels, and fires it across the court, all without a human partner in sight. After years of tinkering on the problem of solo shuttlecock practice, Mitchell settled on a small industrial robotic arm as the heart of the machine, and the result is a rather elegant piece of embedded engineering.
Why the Denso VS050 and How It Was Adapted
The Denso VS050 is a compact industrial arm, and Denso helpfully supplied a 3D model of it, which gave Mitchell a solid starting point for the CAD work. The arm has two jobs in this build. First, a pneumatic grabber on the end effector picks a fresh shuttlecock from the hopper. Second, the arm positions it precisely into the spinning launch wheels that grip the cork and send it flying. Keeping both tasks well-choreographed is the kind of sequencing problem that suits an embedded microcontroller rather nicely.
Mitchell initially considered a Raspberry Pi Pico for the control side, but the input-output demands of communicating with the arm pushed him towards an ATmega AVR instead. Anyone who has spent time wrestling with peripheral counts on small boards will recognise that trade-off immediately: the AVR’s pin count and timing characteristics simply made more sense for the task.
Metal Printing, Disc Materials and Court Testing
Mitchell’s workshop is well-equipped, including the ability to 3D print metal parts, which made prototyping considerably more straightforward than it might otherwise have been. A height-adjustable desk serves as the base, keeping the whole assembly portable enough to wheel onto the court.
The trickiest part of the mechanical design turned out to be the launch discs themselves. The two high-speed discs that grip and propel the shuttlecock must be well-balanced and must not stretch under load. After working through several options, Mitchell landed on a 3D-printed plastic disc fitted with a silicone strip as the gripping surface. The silicone-edged disc proved robust enough in testing and consistent enough in launch to make the system genuinely useful for practice.
Most of the development testing was done in the workshop before the assembly ever saw a badminton court, which is the sensible way to approach it. By the time the robot reached the court, the major mechanical variables had already been resolved, leaving only fine-tuning of disc material and balance.
120 Shots Before Anyone Reaches for a Shuttlecock
One of the more practical details of the build, reported by TecheBlog, is the capacity of the feed system. A motorised carousel holds six tubes, each containing around 20 shuttlecocks, giving the robot approximately 120 shots before it needs reloading. For a solo practice session, that is a meaningful run of repetitions without interruption, which is rather the whole point of building the thing in the first place.
The Denso VS050 badminton robot sits in a growing tradition of homebrew sports-training machines where the builder is the only athlete involved. Tennis ball launchers, baseball pitching machines and table-tennis feeders have all been tackled by hobbyists over the years, but badminton presents specific challenges: a shuttlecock’s aerodynamic drag is unlike almost any other projectile in sport, and the feathered or nylon shuttle deforms easily if gripped badly. Getting a pneumatic grabber and a pair of spinning wheels to handle it reliably, repeatedly and without damage is a non-trivial mechanical problem.
Mitchell’s use of the ATmega AVR as the control brain is the kind of decision that makes sense once you have actually tried to count available I/O lines on a Pico mid-project. The AVR family has been solving exactly these sorts of real-world interfacing problems for decades, and it is satisfying to see it doing so here in a machine that exists purely to let one person practise their backhand at any hour they please. With the carousel loaded and the silicone-edged discs spinning, the Denso VS050 badminton robot is ready to serve.
