The Catch and Relaunch Head

The catch and relaunch head is something we have worked on from the beginning. Some tennis system designers are working on mechanically hitting the ball with an actual tennis racket. While that is possible, the hardware and software requirements for such a system seem daunting.

For tennis training purposes, the player being trained really doesn't care if the ball that is coming at them was hit by a racket or propelled by a ball launcher as long as the trajectory characteristics are accurate for tennis.

Our current system is designed to catch the ball, but it launches another ball that is already locked and loaded.

While there is nothing wrong with this, a catch and relaunch head is potentially simpler, smaller, more efficient and more closely replicates the tennis rally experience.

We have lots of design studies for catch and relaunch systems, including the one pictured above. We expect to have one or more of these in testing in the lab shortly.