Disney Research Robots Does Juggling & Play Catch!

If you thought Disney teams only specialized in building awesome theme parks, here's how Disney research teams use their knowledge from the theme parks into excellent robotics. Disney Theme Parks are full of entertainment robots where they the catch & throw objects at the visiting guests. Taking cue from one such animatronic humanoid, Disney researchers developed test scencario for a throwing and catching game.
Using a external ASUS Xtion PRO LIVE camera system to locate balls and a Kalman filter to predict ball destination and timing. The robot's hand and joint-space are calibrated to the vision coordinate system using a least-squares technique, such that the hand can be positioned to the predicted location.

Successful catches are thrown back two and a half meters forward to the participant, and missed catches are detected to trigger suitable animations that indicate failure. Human to robot partner juggling (three ball cascade pattern, one hand for each partner) is also achieved by speeding up the catching/throwing cycle. Enough talk, check out the video now -