Auburn University graduate Haitham Eletrabi promises to "take the tedious out of tennis" with what Time Magazine, the Discovery Channel, and several other major media outlets have understandably dubbed a Roomba for the courts.
He calls it Tennibot, and after a year's worth of praise from tech blogs, he's turned to Kickstarter to finally bring it to market.
"Tennis players and coaches have to pick up hundreds of tennis balls every time they are on the court, whether they're hitting with the ball machine or practicing serves," Eletrabi, founder and CEO of Tennibot, Inc., said in a Monday press release announcing the launch of a $35,000 Kickstarter campaign to fund full-scale production on the world's first robotic tennis ball collector. "Tennibot was created to solve this problem - saving players and coaches time and effort picking up stray tennis balls, and allowing them to use their time on the court more efficiently, whether it is hitting more balls or hydrating."
Eletrabi, who plays tennis for fun, says the idea for his Penn-munching Pac-Man came to him while earning both an an MBA (2013) and a Ph.D in civil engineering (2014) from Auburn University.
"I went to go buy something to pick (the tennis balls) up, and there was nothing out there to do what I wanted," he told Al.com last May.
Many of the promotional materials for Tennibot were produced in Auburn; the video introducing the Kickstarter campaign was shot at Auburn University's Yarbrough Tennis Center and shows two young women sending their sleek autonomous assistant into a minefield of practice serves and mistimed backhands to sniff out and retrieve as many as 80 balls tennis per mission.
Operated via a smartphone app, the robot can run for up to five hours on a single 90-minute charge.
"To put it simply, Tennibot is a robotic personal ball boy that never gets tired," Eletrabi said. "I love tennis, and I'm excited that we now have a product on the market that allows players to spend more time hitting tennis balls and less time chasing them."
You can check out the Tennibot Kickstarter campaign here.