To beat a friend who keeps winning at badminton, Jack Saito built a motorized racket that spins rapidly to hit shuttlecocks. A single racket vibrated too violently, so he mounted a second one on the opposite side to balance the mechanism. Powered by an electric-skateboard motor and batteries carried in a backpack, it returned shots on court, but ran out of power before he could win.

Practicing badminton alone creates a simple problem: someone still needs to feed the shuttlecocks. This machine solves it by putting a compact Denso VS050 industrial robot arm in charge of shuttle delivery.

A pneumatic gripper picks one shuttlecock from a hopper and carefully feeds it between two high-speed spinning discs for launch. Even metal 3D-printed parts are involved, turning the everyday lack of a practice partner into something closer to a factory automation cell.