Travis Mitchell built a badminton shuttlecock-serving robot around a Denso VS050 industrial robotic arm, solving the single-player problem that has plagued the sport since its invention.
The arm does two jobs: a pneumatic grabber pulls shuttlecocks from a hopper, then feeds them into spinning launch wheels. Mitchell switched from a Raspberry Pi Pico to an ATmega AVR to handle the I/O demands of communicating with the Denso arm. Denso's own 3D model of the VS050 gave him a clean CAD starting point, and access to metal 3D printing accelerated the prototype build. The final disc design, a 3D-printed plastic disc edged with a silicone grip strip, solved the balance and stretch problems that killed earlier wheel configurations.
Read the full piece for the engineering decisions Mitchell made across years of iteration, specifically how the hopper-to-wheel handoff works mechanically and why disc material selection turned out to be the hardest problem on the court, not in the shop.
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