Tennis Ball Collecting Robot: Ball Boys to ABB AMRs

After an hour of serve practice, a hundred balls lie scattered across the court, and somebody has to walk around and pick them all up. A tennis ball collecting robot does that walk for you. This post follows how balls were gathered and fed to players before robots, from Wimbledon's ball boys to René Lacoste's throwing machine and the first Prince ball machines. Then it looks at what is on court today, including Tennibot's autonomous collector and this autumn's new AI tennis robots, and at where ABB's mobile robots and cobots could fit in as the technology matures.

A ball boy rolls a ball along a grass court to another ball boy, 2010. Photo: Bo Mertz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

From Wimbledon ball boys to Lacoste's throwing machine

For most of tennis history, collecting balls was a human job. Wimbledon's own fact sheet records that in the 1920s and 1930s its ball boys came from Shaftesbury Homes, a children's charity. From 1946 they were volunteers from institutions and schools. Ball girls joined in 1977, the first mixed teams worked in 1980, and girls first worked on Centre Court in 1986. Today about 280 ball boys and girls are chosen from around 1,500 applicants, and they train from February to June on feeding, rolling and receiving balls. Club players at home had nobody but themselves and a basket.

Ball boys and girls line up at Wimbledon in 2025. Photo: Partynia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Feeding balls to a player was the other half of the work, and people tried to automate it early. On 21 March 1928, photographers from the Agence Rol agency recorded René Lacoste, the French champion, testing a ball-throwing machine at the tennis club in Asnières. The photos show a tall launcher on a wheeled cart that a person pushed into place and loaded by hand. It spared a coach's arm. The balls that ended up against the back fence still had to be picked up one by one, by the player or a helper.

René Lacoste stands beside a ball-throwing machine at the Asnières tennis club, March 1928. Photo: Agence Rol / Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Ball machines became a business in 1970, when Robert H. McClure founded Prince in Princeton, New Jersey, to make them. Howard Head, who had already built the Head ski company, practised against a Prince machine, joined the firm in the early 1970s and went on to design its oversized racket. For decades after that, collecting stayed manual, helped by tubes and baskets that scoop balls off the ground. In April 2018, Auburn University engineers Haitham Eletrabi and Lincoln Wang, with Kelsey Bixler and David Wahlig, brought Tennibot to market and called it the world's first autonomous tennis ball collector.

The 1928 ball-throwing machine on its wheeled cart at Asnières, watched by a row of men in coats and hats. Photo: Agence Rol / Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Tennis robots that pick up and play back

The first Tennibot used computer vision to roam hard and clay courts, find loose balls and drop them into an attached bucket, while the player picked on a phone app which parts of the court to clear. The company, still based in Auburn, Alabama, now sells a range. Its Collection Autonomous model "picks the balls up while you keep playing" and costs $2,275, and its Partner ball machines start at $1,525 for tennis, pickleball or padel. Golf ranges, which gather thousands of balls a day, are moving the same way: in September 2026, Range Genie and Wayrobo announced autonomous range pickers for US golf facilities, sold through Wittek Golf.

A tennis ball on a clay court, the kind of loose ball a collector robot has to find. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Some of the newest machines collect and play in one unit. At IFA 2026 in Berlin, Acemate launched its S10 Pro tennis robot, which tracks the ball with dual 4K cameras and moves on omnidirectional wheels. In Rally Mode, Acemate says, the robot catches in-bounds shots and returns the ball from where it landed, and it holds up to 100 balls. Later in September, Tenniix showed a wheeled AI robot playing Chinese player Wang Qiang at the Billie Jean King Cup Finals, and Pongbot was named Official Ball Machine of the Australian Open in a multi-year deal starting in 2027.

Wang Qiang plays against the Tenniix ULTRA MAX robot at the Billie Jean King Cup Finals, September 2026. Photo: Tenniix via PR Newswire

ABB does not make a tennis robot, and none of these products use ABB hardware. Still, a court robot needs much of what ABB already sells for factories. The Flexley Mover AMR family finds its way with AI-based Visual SLAM instead of floor markings, and a collector on an open court has the same task: build a map, steer around people and obstacles, and go back to a base to empty. Our post on the robot golf caddy covers that follow-and-avoid problem on a golf course, and the ABB robot use cases page lists where these AMRs work today.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Where court and range robots go next

For homes and small clubs, the next step probably looks like the path robotic lawn mowers have taken: a quiet machine that sits in a dock, wakes up after a session and sweeps the court while nobody watches. Big outdoor sites show the idea can scale. FireFly's electric autonomous reel mowers, for example, cut the fairways at the PGA Tour's Black Desert Championship in Utah in October 2024. A tennis court is a simpler surface, but the target is harder, since small yellow balls roll under benches and pile up in the corners by the net.

FireFly electric autonomous reel mowers on the fairways at the Black Desert Championship in Utah, 2024. Photo: Lawnjunkie / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

At academies and big tournaments, the unsolved part is the handover between machines. A collector gathers balls, a person carries the basket to the feeder, and someone checks for worn or wet balls. A cobot such as ABB's GoFa CRB 15000, which stops when it senses contact with a person, could in principle sort and reload balls at a courtside station. Programs like that are usually tested first in RobotStudio. Nobody has announced such a product, and it would have to justify its price against a plain basket.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

Cost is the biggest hurdle. A $2,275 collector competes with a simple pick-up tube or basket, so for now these machines sell mostly to coaches and clubs that put a price on their time. Safety matters too, because a robot rolling across a court shares it with running players and children. Clay courts and wet grass still give vision systems trouble. Wimbledon will probably keep its ball boys and girls as a tradition for a long time, while at the local club on a Tuesday evening a robot may soon be doing the chasing.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com