Badminton Robot: From Shuttle Feeders to ABB Arms

A badminton robot sounds like a gimmick until you watch a coach feed the same drop shot two hundred times in a row. That repetitive feeding is the job machines took over first, and it is still where most of the real progress happens. This post follows the badminton robot from the hand-fed drills of early clubs, through the tripod shuttle feeders sold today, to a legged robot from ETH Zurich that rallies with people and a used industrial arm turned into a practice partner this summer. It closes with where compact ABB arms and cobots could fit, and what still holds the idea back.

A badminton match at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in the Porte de la Chapelle Arena. Photo: Chabe01 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How badminton players drilled before machines

The game takes its name from Badminton House, the Duke of Beaufort's estate in Gloucestershire, but its first written rules came from the garrison town of Poona in India in 1873. The Badminton Association of England published its rules in 1893, and the All England Championships started in 1899. The International Badminton Federation followed in 1934 with nine founding members, and badminton became an Olympic sport at Barcelona in 1992. For most of that history, training meant one thing: a partner or coach on the other side of the net, hitting or throwing shuttles by hand, over and over.

Players at an Ireland versus England badminton match in 1923. Photo: Unknown author via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The shuttlecock itself made that work slow. A regulation shuttle has 16 goose or duck feathers fixed into a cork base and weighs between 4.75 and 5.50 grams. Feathers are brittle, so shuttles need humidifying before play and are usually replaced every three or four games. A coach running a multi-shuttle drill would stand with a box of them, feeding one after another to the same spot so the player could groove a clear, a net shot or a smash return. It is good training, but the quality depends on the feeder's arm and patience.

A feather shuttlecock with its rounded cork base. Photo: Stanislas Perrin / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first answer was the shuttle feeder: a launcher on a tripod, loaded with tubes of shuttles, that fires them out with spinning wheels. Commercial models let a coach set the height, speed and interval, and some sweep left and right to move the player around the court. That took the tiring part off the coach. The machine still fires a fixed program, though. It cannot see where the player is standing, change the next shot after a weak return, or hit back a shuttle that comes over the net, so the coach stays on court to read the drill.

A shuttle feeder machine on a tripod, loaded with tubes of shuttlecocks. Photo: Wendrock / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A legged rally partner and a recycled industrial arm

The jump from feeder to player came from research labs. In 2025 a team at ETH Zurich, led by Yuntao Ma, published "Learning coordinated badminton skills for legged manipulators" in Science Robotics. They used ANYmal-D, a four-legged robot from the ETH spinoff ANYbotics, fitted with an arm from another spinoff, Duatic, that holds the racket. A stereo camera tracks the shuttle. A reinforcement learning controller decides how to move the legs and arm together, and a perception noise model teaches it that fast motion makes the camera less reliable. The robot managed rallies of up to 10 shots with human players.

An ANYmal four legged robot from ANYbotics at ARCHE 2019, the platform family used in ETH Zurich's badminton work. Photo: Auledas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The newer story is cheaper and closer to a club hall. In late August and early September 2026, Hackaday and Interesting Engineering covered Travis Mitchell, a badminton player who spent about six months turning a used Denso VS-050 six-axis industrial arm into a shuttle server. Two 400 W servo motors spin a pair of wheels at up to 6,000 rpm, using 3D printed hubs with a silicone strip after foam and rubber failed. Pneumatic cylinders grip a shuttle and push it into the wheels, a carousel of six tubes holds about 120 shuttles, and the controller stores up to 127 positions, so the arm can serve from different spots and angles.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, a compact six axis arm for fast small part work. Photo: ABB

No ABB robot has been reported in a badminton project, so what follows is a possibility. The arm in Mitchell's build is in the same class as ABB's compact IRB 1200, which is made for fast, repeatable small-part work. Next to players, a cobot is the more natural fit: the GoFa CRB 15000 has torque sensors in its joints and stops when it feels contact. SafeMove can cap speed and keep the arm inside a set zone. Shot positions could be taught by hand or planned first in RobotStudio, the same way our post on the table tennis robot describes for another racket sport.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot being guided by hand at an assembly table. Photo: ABB

Where court training robots are heading

In homes and small clubs, the near future looks like smarter feeders rather than humanoid opponents. A camera that sees where the player stands could pick the next shot, log reaction times and repeat the drills a coach sets. A mobile base could gather shuttles from the floor between sets, a job already explored for tennis in our post on the tennis ball collecting robot. Each of these pieces exists today; the work is in making them cheap, quiet and safe enough to sit at the side of a court full of people.

Tai Tzu-ying practises at Taiwan's National Sports Training Center badminton hall, 2023. Photo: Sports Administration, Ministry of Education (Taiwan) via Wikimedia Commons (attribution)

For elite training and research, legged and wheeled robots that actually return shots will keep improving. The ETH researchers named the main limit themselves: perception has to get faster for longer rallies and full-court play. Badminton is brutal for vision, because a shuttle can leave the racket faster than a tennis serve and then slow sharply. In factories, the same mix of fast camera tracking and coordinated arm control is what robots need to pick parts off a moving conveyor, so progress on the court and on the line can feed each other.

An ANYmal legged robot on an inspection round in an industrial plant. Photo: ANYbotics / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The hard parts are money, safety and know-how. A used industrial arm with a compressor and electronics is already a serious hobby budget, and a new cobot cell costs more. An arm swinging a racket at full speed near a player needs speed limits, safe zones and a proper risk assessment on top of an emergency stop. Then someone has to program the shots, tune the launcher and keep the shuttles coming, which takes robotics skills most clubs do not have. Until those costs fall, the badminton robot will mostly live in labs, home workshops and a few well equipped training halls.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

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