Mini golf distance measuring device

Community General Discussions
1

I am looking for a remote device that can very accurately measure the distance from a golf ball to the hole on a green roughly 100 sq ft. The device will not be controlled by the player, so please if your answer is a measuring tape, don’t bother responding. Ultrasonic distance sensor? Lidar? Digital camera? RFID? Engineering is clearly not my thing, so any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

2

How do you want the output to be provided, and how much programming are you prepared to do? From a normal design standpoint:

  • How to know what a “hole” is?
  • How to know what a “golf ball” is?
  • Is the green in that area perfectly flat?

Ultrasonic: You’d need to rotate the sensor, and the bounce back from a rounded ball with indentations might cause issues
Lidar: If you’re prepared to place something at or on the hole and do a 360 degree scan at the center height of a golf ball, you would need a microcontroller to “look for” a semi-circular object, calculate the closest position of that semi-circle, and subtract the radius. This approach would not work well if the green was not perfectly flat.
Camera: Tends to be a great option for tracking; you’d need to mount the camera at a height looking down, and have it detect the white ball, and the black of the hole. If you mount a camera at the height of the ball, you’d need something fairly high resolution and able to determine the size of the ball, which corresponds to distance. Quite a bit of programming in either case. A three camera setup looking for a specific color might be an option as well.
RFID: This tends to only tell you if the “tag” is within proximity of the detector and does not give distance.
GPS: Not accurate enough.

This system would be great, but the transmitter is too large for a golf ball:
robotshop.com/en/indoor-nav … 15mhz.html

There do not seem to be any “easy” solutions for this, and nothing out of the box. The closest application would be RoboCup (soccer) where robots have to detect (and distinguish from background) a white ball, and get the distance to it using a vision system.