Hey guys!
Recently I had an interview with Davis Baer, the co-founder of OneUp and, also, a Hacker Noon writer. If you find the TenniRobo project interesting, then probably you may like this conversation as well. We were talking with Davis about how I started working on the robot and what motivated me the most, about how the project is doing at the moment and what are my plans for the future.
Extract:
As a table tennis player, I thought that a robot that ‘knows’ how to serve balls like a coach would be a good option in this situation. But as the research has shown the actually good robots are too complex and too expensive, and the cheap ones do not have the necessary functions. Moreover, even the expensive machines are often unable to provide “human-like” ball behavior. So, suddenly, it became clear that many table tennis players have the same problem of choice.
In a few months, the first primitive but working prototype was ready to use. Apparently, the local community was captivated by it, so very soon I sold it out. Actually, it was the first validation of the idea, and the time when I realized that my hobby project can become very useful for the table tennis community business.
READ MORE AT HACKER NOON: Founder Interviews: Sergey Vasyliev of TenniRobo