Transducing Rigid
Body Dynamics for Sports Training
Professor
Noel Perkins
Mechanical Engineering
Department
The fine motor control needed in many sports (and
other activities) often results by respecting the age-old adage that Òpractice
makes perfect.Ó However, practice alone does not guarentee success, and
particularly so when it only leads to fine tuning a fundamentally poor
technique. This talk will review recent inventions used for diagnosing proper
technique by measuring the motion of the sports equipment used for golf,
tennis, baseball, fly casting, crew, hockey, etc.
The inventions employ MEMS inertial sensors in
compact, low-power modules to transduce 2-D and 3-D rigid body dynamics. Combinations of accelerometers and
angular rate gyros are employed to measure the acceleration and angular
velocity vectors of a rigid body of sports equipment. Inspection of this raw
data, or integrated forms of this data, reveal metrics that readily distinguish
good vs. poor technique. More subtle differences amoung the highest calibre
techniques can often be distinguished as well. The identification and
measurement of quantitative performance metrics open the door to novel sports
training aids. Sensor modules engineered for both wired and wireless operation
will be reviewed and their application to golf and to fly casting will be
discussed in some detail.
3:30 Ð 4:30 p.m.