Impact Position Estimation for Baseball Batting with a Force-Irrelevant Vibration Feature

In this work we propose a novel method for impact position estimation during baseball batting, which is independent of impact intensity, i.e., force-irrelevant. In our experiments, we mount a piezoelectric vibration sensor on the knob of a wooden bat to record: (1) 3600 vibration signals (waveforms) from ball–bat impacts in the static experiment—30 impacts from each of 40 positions (distributed 1–40 cm from the end of the barrel) and 3 intensities (drop heights at 75, 100, and 125 cm, resp.), and (2) 45 vibration signals from actual battings by three baseball players in the dynamic experiment. The results show that the peak amplitude of the signal in the time domain, and the peaks of the first, second, and third eigenfrequencies (EFs) of the bat all increase with the impact intensity. However, the ratios of peaks at these three EFs (1st/2nd, 2nd/3rd, and 1st/3rd) hardly change with the impact intensity, and the observation is consistent for both the static and dynamic experiments across all impact positions. In conclusion, we have observed that the ratios of peaks at the first three EFs are a force-irrelevant feature, which can be used to estimate the impact position in baseball batting.