This robotic basketball hoop guarantees a basket every time — here’s how it works

• YouTuber Shane Wighton made a video showing off a robotic basketball hoop that he made.
• He wrote programs allowing the hoop to track the ball and move the backboard to get the ball in the basket.
• Except for occasional glitches, Wighton’s basketball hoop is the secret to getting basket on every shot.
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Not even professional basketball players make every shot they take, but they could with this gadget. Youtuber Shane Wighton posted a video on his channel, Stuff Made Here, showing how his robotic basketball hoop design works and demonstrating some shots.

In a 16-minute video, Wighton gets into the technical details of how he made the robotic basketball hoop work and how he fixed bugs. Here are some of the highlights, and a video of how it all works.

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Wighton previously designed a basketball hoop with a backboard that guided basketballs into the net.

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It worked, but there were limits. It couldn’t handle line drives, for example.

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For version two, he used computer vision to create a robotic hoop that can move in real time to correct shots and get them in the basket.

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The hoop has three motors, each controlling an arm that moves the backboard in as wide a range as possible.

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The backboard moves along a 3D printed joint.

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Using facial recognition, the hoop can recognize who is shooting.

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Using that information, it can keep track of a specific person’s shots and let them know if they are accurate and consistent.

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Using a Microsoft Kinect to determine how far away a person is, the hoop was also able to identify a basketball and determine its trajectory, which then determined how the hoop would move.

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It had to do all this in the 600 milliseconds between when the ball was thrown and when it hits the hoop.

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Here is the hoop in action.