Development of an intelligent controller for sports training system based on FPGA

Abstract Training, sports equipment, and facilities are the main aspects of sports advancement. Countries are investing heavily in the training of athletes, especially in table tennis. Athletes require basic equipment for exercises, but most athletes cannot afford the high cost; hence, the necessity for developing a low-cost automated system has increased. To enhance the quality of the athletes’ training, the proposed research focuses on using the enormous developments in artificial intelligence by developing an automated training system that can maintain the training duration and intensity whenever necessary. In this research, an intelligent controller has been designed to simulate training patterns of table tennis. The intelligent controller will control the system that sends the table tennis balls’ intensity, speed, and duration. The system will detect the hand sign that has been previously assigned to different speeds using an image detection method and will work accordingly by accelerating the speed using pulse width modulation techniques. Simply showing the athletes’ hand sign to the system will trigger the artificial intelligent camera to identify it, sending the tennis ball at the assigned speed. The artificial intelligence of the proposed device showed promising results in detecting hand signs with minimum errors in training sessions and intensity. The image detection accuracy collected from the intelligent controller during training was 90.05%. Furthermore, the proposed system has a minimal material cost and can be easily installed and used.