Shane Wighton's Basketball Backboard Bots Are Getting Out of Hand

We've come to realize that Shane Wighton, host of the Stuff Made Here YouTube channel, is very bad at sports. To compensate, he has put his math and engineering skills to use several times building robots that do the hard part of sporting for him. In the past, he built basketball backboards that make it difficult to mix a shot. But even those couldn't help if his shots were bad enough. In his latest video, Wighton spent an absurd amount of time and money to build a massive basketball backboard bot that makes it impossible to miss a shot.

Wighton's previous robotic backboards were great, but they had limited movement. If the shooter wasn't capable of hitting a wall, the backboard couldn't help. This new backboard is different. It can move anywhere in a three-dimensional shape roughly the size of a half-court. It can also tilt at any angle within that space, giving it six degrees of freedom. This means that a ball thrown anywhere in the space will result in a swish—no matter how poor the shot.

Building this system took both high-level math and some serious hardware. That hardware includes six 8HP electric motors (each with a bicycle disc brake), a microcontroller and drivers for the motors, a computer running Wighton's software, and an expensive OptiTrack motion capture suite of cameras. The small foam basketball has tracking markers, which lets the OptiTrack system capture the ball's location in 3D space every couple of inches as it soars through the air.

From there, it all comes down to mathematical wizardry. Wighton's software uses the ball coordinates to calculate its parabolic trajectory, so within a few milliseconds it can determine where the ball will go. It then determines all of the possible "solutions," which are positions to which the backboard can move that will result in a successful basket. It eliminates the solutions that would take too much time or that the backboard can't physically achieve, and then selects one of the remaining solutions at random. The software then tells each motor to spool or unspool the cables going to the backboard in order to move to the desired position.

Because the backboard is so light (it is foam encased in fiberglass), it can accelerate very quickly. While the ball is still in the air, the backboard can move across the court fast enough to intercept the ball and make a basket. We're simplifying the build here, so be sure to watch Wighton's full video to get all the nitty gritty details.