Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronics and Sustainable Communication Systems (ICESC 2020)

IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20V66-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4108-4

Arduino based Automated Sports Court Drawing

Bot
Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, Sreevatsava Reddy Musani, Hemanth Sai Venkata Srinivasa Kumar Nidamanuru, Lokesh Gadde
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri, India
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract—S tadium maintenance staff are one of those court tidy. The robot should be capable of drawing the
people who work hard to maintain the court correctly. One lines of boundaries and layout configurations, comp lying
of the items that often require rework is the lines drawn on with the official requirements, prescribed for a specific
the court for maintenance of track or boundaries or even the game o f sport. For examp le, when the length of a side is
entire court when it is football stadium etc. Besides, for specified for the layout of a square lawn, the robot should
indoor stadiums that host volleyball, basketball, tennis, etc.,
lines need to be drawn. Redrawing the court after each draw a square as per specified dimensions, using
match is one of the major problems of concern. In such a powdered chalk. An IR sensor is used to calculate the
scenario, a system is proposed that can draw the court lines linear d istance traveled by the robot. Servo SG 90 is used
autonomously. The objective of this research work is to for opening and closing the funnel, to pour the powder.
present a design of an autonomous sports court drawing bot
that can draw the linear lines automatically which can aid in II. M OT IVAT ION
the maintenance work of the sports stadium. Since the latter part of the 20th century,
automation has permeated the mult ifarious aspects of
Keywords— Arduino based robot, autonomou s, painting modern life; this trend is expanding increasing rapidly in
bot. residential, industrial and commercial sectors. Nowadays,
autonomous machines have been deployed in applications
I. INT RODUCT ION such as industry bots(Manufacturing), house cleaner bots,
As per the report by World Stadiu ms and hospitality bots. Some situations require speed,
(worldstadiums.com), there are about 4749 stadiums in efficiency, and accuracy, where automated machines are
over 224 countries all over the world. So me stadiu ms are very handy. Self-directed machines can increase
so huge that they can host more than 150,000 spectators. productivity, reduce the time for production.
These stadiums include general sports, football, track After every game in the courts inside stadium lot of
games, baseball, cricket, rugby, fie ld lacrosse, bandy, and reworking on the tracks is required as part of maintenance.
bullfighting, etc. Maintenance of these stadiums is a huge One of the most significant rework is re -painting the tracks
task that ranges from clean liness, security, seats, tracking which are not in proper shape after the game. Painting of
assets, food, drinks, t icket counters, player’s roo ms , etc. to tracks is a time-consuming work if done manually. In some
drawing tracks on courts. There are several ways for cases, the painters need to keep painting for several
maintenance of stadiums including automating the work hundreds of meters of painting. This is true even in the
request, tracking and locating the assets, integration of the case of painting tracks on roads for dividers, lanes , etc. In
electronic gadgets like mobile phones for proper such scenarios, the painters have to paint several thousands
coordination and speeding up the work, reworking on the of kilo meters of tracks on roads. Automating such a task
tracks and ground, etc. One of the important aspects of makes life easier and helps in speedy painting whether it is
reworking on the tracks is the painting of the track which sports courts or roads. In this research work, an automated
is an integral part of the sports. Also, it gives a great deal painting bot is proposed that can automate the painting of
of appeal to the courts and the stadiums. tracks in sports stadiums.
There is not much research work in this field of
III. RELAT ED W ORKS
autonomous sports track paint ing. Even in the case of
painting marks/tracks on the road, there is not much The authors in [1] analy zed the co mpatib ility of
research. All that could find for painting or drawing the infrared (IR) sensors for diverse applications. They used
tracks in sports court is presented in a detailed way under the reflection phenomena for the detection of obstacles.
the Related Works section. The primary aim of this paper Using the method used by the author, the number of
is to present the development of an autonomous robot, rotations can be found that give the distance. In [2], the
which reduces the effort of the people working in authors Mohammed A.H. Ali used a painting system
stadiums or on sport-grounds. In any game of sports, attached to the WMR (Wheeled mob ile Robot) p latform,
stadium maintenance staff work diligently to maintain the to control the flow of the paint on the WMR platform. In
court, marked with the official layout of the field or court, [3] used an IR measurement principle, PSD, for an
marked with boundaries, tracks, creases, etc., perfectly. obstacle detection system that demonstrated good
They face a lot of hard work to cover the court in the detection features for obstacles of different materials and
middle of the game during rain. Live examp les are seen in colors. The team in [4] developed an automatic line
our schools and colleges during sports day where our staff marker robot that consistently draws high-quality straight
works hard to maintain the courts. They face various lines and circles, using the feedback data from the sensor
difficult ies such as maintaining the pitch and keeping the data and draw the lines accurately as per the requirements .

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronics and Sustainable Communication Systems (ICESC 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20V66-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4108-4

In [5], the authors presented two design principles for the

development of large size paint ing mob ile bot (LSP-Bot).
Their device has a wide marking system, which facilitates
marking larger, well-drawn paintings. In [6] authors
presented the design of a wheeled bot, to find the optimal
method of controlling the bot using a smartphone app ,
which g ives the time delay and control mode fo r the robot
to be follo wed. In [7], the author describes a vision
algorith m for object detection and reorganization during a
mobile robot journey on a road, and also describe a way to
draw a path while the robot is moving on the road. In [8],
the authors proposed a method for follo wing a lane on an
asphalt road using image processing. They also build a
testbed, that aims to paint a semi faded or half faded lane Figure 1: System architecture
mark automat ically on the asphalt road exactly on the half
faded line. In [9], the authors used a method based on The controller b lock consists of an Arduino
matching a temp late between the lane mark model and a microcontroller board interfaced with motor driver and
detected lane mark. They used the robot which aims to servomotor which are p resent in mobility b lock. Arduino
repaint a half faded lane mark automatically. In [10], the IDE (Integrated Develop ment Environment) is used to
authors presented how to control high-performance send commands fro m the Arduino board for the control of
motors for the linear drive mot ion keeping an encoder the motor driver and servomotor. The mob ility b lock is
signal correction and oscillation damping which g ives comprised of a servo motor, DC motor, motor driver and
control over the speed DC(Direct Current) motor. In [11], wheels. Figure 1 shows a schematic outline of the system
the authors integrated the steering wheel and the robot for architecture.
the motion. They used steering to control the speed of the
A. Code Block
robot. Where all the robots are maneuver in any of the
surfaces, terrains and avoid obstacles . In [12], the authors This block consists of Arduino (.ino) code which
contains the instructions that drive the motor. The
made an automated voice-controlled ho me navigation
system for elder people where the wheelchair avoid all the working of the robot is based on the instructions, which
obstacles and move in the path to reach the destination are present in the Arduino code. The code consists of two
main segments: counter to count the number of rotations,
with the given co mmand the final destination is saved so
that the robot reaches the final destination without and a device to control the servo motor. The software
colliding with objects. In [13] the authors made an algorith m takes care of the tracking of the distance and the
right amount of paint for drawing the court. When the IR
efficient way for the high performance of robots by
calculation payload and mean error rate analysis to get sensor detects the object, the counter increases and when
optimu m results. In [14], the authors implemented an the counter reaches the required value given in the code
(experimental value) the bot changes its direction as
autonomous balance mechanism for linear mot ion for a
two-wheeled bot using PID controls and a feedback shown in Figure 2. The change in the direction of the bot
control mechanism. In [15], the authors made an is based on the time delay process. First, the bot speed is
set to min imu m to get an accurate 90 degrees turn. After
autonomous wheeled robot where it can deliver products
using GPS location in which they a method to control the doing many experiments an accurate time is found that bot
motion and direction of the bot using GPS. will take to rotate an accurate of 90-degree turn under all
circu mstances. Let ‘L’ be the length (in cms) of the
IV. SYST EM A RCHIT ECT URE straight line to be drawn. By the time counter increments
by 2, wheels comp lete one rotation and for one rotation
The system architecture of bot is constituted of
robot moves forward by 8 centimeters. So for L cms,
three main blocks: code, mobility and controller blocks as
need L/8 wheel rotations i.e. round(L/4) increments in the
shown in Fig. 1. The code block consists of all the
counters. So for the robot to move forward by 1meter the
software required to move the robot in a required
counter should increase by 25. To mark a square of (1mtr)
configuration such as square, rectangle to draw in the
X(1mtr) the robot should move forward until the counter
court. It wo rks based on the input dimensions and the
gets 25, and to take a right turn time delaying technique is
geometry of the court painting. These are inputs to the
used to turn the robot 90 deg. This process of the straight
code block.
path and right turn is continued until the square path is
completely drawn (4 straight paths and 3 right turns) and
the observations were shown in the results. During the
straight motion, the servo motor is on so that powder falls
on the ground.

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronics and Sustainable Communication Systems (ICESC 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20V66-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4108-4

Figure 3 shows the image of a robot when all the

connections were established.

Figure 3: Completely Integrated Robot

B. Arduino Uno
Figure 2: Flowchart of Arduino code working The Arduino UNO is a microcontroller board based on
Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller. The board is
B. Mobility Block
configured with digital and analog, input-output pins,
The mobility block consists of a chassis, servo which can be used to connect with motor driver and servo
motor, DC motors, motor-driver, and wheels. DC motors motor. The Arduino board can be programmed with the
are preferred because they are cheap, smaller Arduino IDE via a type B USB cable. Arduino board can
configuration, and lighter in weight. By looking at our
be charged either by a USB cable or an external 12V
requirements which were described in the introduction
battery. The below table shows the specifications of the
where the main aim is to draw the boundaries of a court
(specific to a game such as a soccer, volleyball, Arduino board such as Flash Memory, clock speed
basketball), the robot must move slower to ensure that it (Number of clock cycles per second).
draws the line markers perfectly. DC motors were C. IR sensor(Infra-Red)
preferred because of ease of control of their speed when
Nowadays, IR technology is used in a wide range of
connected to PWM (Pulse width modulation) pins of the
Arduino board. wireless applications. An IR sensor is a device that
transmits and detects electromagnetic radiat ion for a
C. Controller Block maximu m range of 20 cm. It is used to detect the motion
The controller block, interfaced with the motor of an object. The working of the IR sensor is mainly based
driver, receives and decodes all the input commands which on three principles namely Planck's Radiation Law,
are present in Arduino code through a wired Wien's Displacement Law, and Stephen-Boltzmann Law.
connection(USB), to issue the corresponding control signal Radiat ions emitted by an IR sensor are invisib le to naked
to the modules within the Mobility block. Its functionality, eyes, but they can be detected by an infrared sensor. The
governed by the commands from the code block, controls principle of an In frared sensor is to transmit an infrared
the movement of robots in a specific direction based on the signal, the transmitted signal bounces back fro m the
commands. surface of the body and it will be received by the IR
receiver. It consists of 3 main pins named as VCC (power
V. DESIGN A ND IMPLEMENT AT ION
supply), GND (ground), OUT (output). The basic
The design and implementation of the robot are phenomenon is shown in Figure 4. Based on the intensity
shown in Figure 2. The bot consists of a chassis, Arduino of the signal received by the IR receiver, the IR output is.
Uno, motor driver and Power supply, IR Sensor and Servo An Infrared sensor includes an LED and a Photodiode
motor. which can be used to transmit and detect signals, which
A. Chassis are the essential elements of a photo-coupler. IR sensor
Laser-cut cardboard is used as the chassis of the also contains the IC operational amplifier, a
robot. The dimensions of the chassis are 20 cm in length, potentiometer, and an LED. The IR sensor has three pins
10 cm in breadth and 0.5 cm in thickness. The operational namely VCC, GND, OUT. VCC is fo r the power supply.
voltage range of motors is (3 to 6) V. Two chassis had OUT will produce a value 1 when it finds an obstacle, 0
been used that are placed one above the other between vice versa.
which the load is placed to stabilize the bot. Chassis has
provisions to fix DC motors along with space for the
circuit of the robot, Arduino, funnel and power supply.
Four DC motors can be accommodated within the robot
The Speed of the robot is based on the load carried by the
robot. It has four-wheels, each of 6.5 cm diameter. During
one rotation, the robot traverses a linear distance of 15 cm.

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronics and Sustainable Communication Systems (ICESC 2020)
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Figure 5: Motor Driver (L293D)

VI. EXPERIMENT S A ND RESULT S

The motors, connected through a motor driver,
Figure 4: Phenomena how IR works were controlled by an Arduino micro-controller. An
D. Servo Motor obstacle detection method was implemented, to determine
the distance traveled by the bot, using an IR sensor to
A servo motor is an electronic device, which is
detect the number of rotations of the wheel. White tapes
commonly deployed in auto mation applications. It can be
were attached on the opposite sides of the motor’s shaft,
used to rotate (or move by a specific angle of rotation)
as shown in Figure 6 and an IR sensor is placed
certain parts of a machine with greater efficiency and
correspondingly, opposite to the shaft, to aid the detection
accuracy. Servo motor facilitates perfect controls of
of these tapes. Figure 7 shows the IR sensor placed
position and velocity. It works on the principle of pulse-
opposite to the shaft. For every rotation of the wheel, the
width modulation (PWM) Thus, angle covered during
IR sensor detects white tapes, using this sensor data the
rotation is based on the duration of the pulse (instructions
number of rotations of the wheel can be counted, thereby
present in Arduino code) that is applied to a pin connected
the distance traveled by the bot. The robot will move as
to a Servo motor. A servo motor consists of an encoder
per the code given in the code b lock. The funnel will be
that provides feedback on speed and position. The servo
opened or closed using the servo motor. Two experiments
motor uses the feedback of the position to maintain its
had been done using the robot, the first one is to draw a
control over the final position and motion. Moreover, the
square of length 1m and the second one is to draw a
input which is given to the servo motor is a signal that
rectangle of length 1m and breadth 0.5m. The variables
contains the position which requires, and it is transmitted
used in the table are length (L1, L2, L3, L4), Breadth (B1,
to the output shaft.
B2), angles (A 1, A2, A 3) made by the robot during
E. Moto Driver(L293D) turnings. The above-stated experiments were done on the
A motor driver integrated circuit is a chip used to plane surface.
control motors within robots. It is used as a connector Tables 1 and 2 tabulates the results of the experiments
between microcontrollers and motors in the robot without performed. When the robot started painting the 1m x 1m
which motors in the robot cannot be controlled. These square, there was an error of about -5 cm to +5 cm
motor drivers are designed to control two DC motor whereas the angular accuracy is -5 degrees to +5 degrees.
simu ltaneously in different directions. Motor Drivers When the robot painting a rectangle of 1m x 0.5m, an
usually have 16 pins. The main purpose of motor d rivers error of -3 cm to +5cm on the length side, an error of -2
is that microcontroller operates at lower voltages, whereas cm to +4 cm on the breadth side and angular accuracy of -
motors require much higher vo ltages to operate. Hence, 6 degrees to +4 degrees.
power cannot be supplied fro m a microcontroller to the
motor. This is the main reason a motor driver IC is used.
The maximu m voltage that can be supplied to the
motor d river is 36 V. It can supply 600 mA per channel.
As it can run motors up to 36 V, big motors can run with
this L293D. It obtains data from the microcontroller and
transmits the signals to the motors. It contains two voltage
pins, in which one is used for receiving current fro m the
power supply for the working of the motor driver and the Figure 6:White tapes on wheel shaft
second pin is used to apply voltage to the motors. The
L293D motor d river changes its output signal based on the
input obtained fro m the microcontroller. Motor Driver has
a range of voltages from 5 V to 36 V DC. Figure 5 shows
a schematic of the motor driver.

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronics and Sustainable Communication Systems (ICESC 2020)
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section described the system architecture and working of

the entire design. The robot design and implementation
details are provided in the implementation section. The
connection of the motors to the Arduino th rough the
motor drivers was established successfully. The robot is
tested with rectangle, square patterns, and results of the
corresponding patterns were observed to measure the
accuracy. The practical results obtained were of a 5
percent error co mpared to the expected outputs. The
Figure 7:IR Sensor placed near encoder objective of this research work to design an autonomous
sports court drawing bot that can draw the linear lines
Table 1: For a square with length 1m automatically is achieved which can aid in the
maintenance work of the sports stadium.
T rail L1 L2 L3 L4 A1 A2 A3
No (m) (m) (m) (m) (deg) (deg) (deg) VIII. FUT URE W ORKS
1 1.01 0.98 1.1 1.05 85.2 95.5 92.55
2 1.05 1.05 0.95 0.98 93.5 93 89.52 The versatility of the robot can be enhanced to
3 0.98 0.95 1.05 1.07 97 84.5 87 draw boundaries and markers for numerous other sports
Mean 1.03 0.99 1.03 1.03 91.91 91 89.3 such as a standard-sized badminton court, where material
used for the drawing the lines can be switched to paint, to
Table 2: For a rectangle with a length of 1 m and a augment the durability and discernibility of the drawn
breadth of 0.5 m patterns. An Android app can be developed and integrated
with the robot, by which the pattern (Stadium Courts) can
T rail L1 B1 L2 B2 A1 A2 A3 be chosen to be drawn by the robot.
No (m) (m) (m) (m) (deg) (deg) (deg)
1 1.02 0.54 1.04 0.48 86.7 91.5 93.5
A CKNOWLEDGMENT
2 1.04 0.49 0.97 0.54 84.5 93.5 87.5
3 1.05 0.53 1.03 0.53 92.9 89.5 91.5 Thankful to HuT Labs and Electronics and
Mean 1.03 0.52 1.01 0.51 88 91.5 90.8 Co mmunicat ion Eng ineering depart ment of A mrita
Vishwa Vidyapeetham, A mritapuri Campus for their
continuous support and encouragement for this research .

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