Robotics Commons^™

Dynamics And Control Of The Shoot-The-Moon Tabletop Game, Peng Xu

All Theses

The classic table-top game Shoot-the-Moon has interesting dynamics despite its simple structure, consisting of a steel ball rolling on two cylindrical rods. The two sloped rods are hinged at the lower ends and allowed to freely slide in a slot at the higher end. The ball can amazingly roll upward along the rods under carefully manipulation of the rods. There is also an interaction between ball rotation and translation that cause the ball to ``shoot'' (quickly accelerate).
In this thesis, the kinematics are developed for Shoot-the-Moon and then equations of motion are derived using both Lagrangian and Newtonian approaches. The …