The 5G TSN Juggler was another project I undertook during my time at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technologies. It was designed as a demonstrator to showcase the reliability of TSN and the speed of 5G in real-time applications.

The project drew inspiration from the Octo-Bouncer developed by Tobias Kuhn. We reached out to him initially to secure permission to create our own version, and he graciously allowed us to use designs he had developed as a foundation for further development. A colleague of mine adapted the technical drawings to fit a larger version, and I was tasked with the rest.

This involved wiring all the components, designing the circuit boards, and programming to bring the project to life. I was able to adapt Tobias' code for certain parts, especially the inverse kinematics (thankfully). However, since he used a combination of a Unity model and his actual bouncer, some parts were simpler to develop from scratch.

As I had already worked extensively with image processing for a robotics project previously, this was also relatively simple (the Fraunhofer green ball helped a lot). Once it was all done, I also packaged it in a nice GUI, making it possible for anyone to set it up under different lighting conditions and start different bouncing/balancing modes.

We were very pleased to see it up and running and attracting a lot of attention at the Hannover Messe, especially after so many late nights in the lab!