A Performance Analysis System for the Sport of Bowling

Prior to the start of this project (May 1992), there were no references in the literature or
the various patent databases to any previous attempts to develop this kind of internal
system. Brunswick Corporation has since developed a robot that can throw a bowling
ball with repeatable and precise amounts of speed, spin, and axis turn and tilt, but the
subsequent response of the ball is still measured with external sensors [9]. It is certainly
possible that one or more of the various bowling ball manufacturers may have developed
proprietary means for internally assessing the performance of their products. If that is the
case, they have chosen to retain that information in the form of trade secrets.
With no prior research to fall back on, it was necessary to design and build an initial
sensor module simply to establish that it was physically possible to construct such a
device within the extremely limited confines of its intended environment. A reliable and
inexpensive means for transferring data in a wireless (non-contact) fashion from the
module to a PC also had to be developed.
Those two tasks were completed as an initial part of the feasibility study. The paper
presents relevant background and details of the hardware that are essential to
understanding the design and development of the embedded software, and/or the analysis
of the raw data collected. However, an exhaustive presentation on the hardware is not
within the scope of this paper.
Since the waveform that SMARTDOT was attempting to capture had apparently never
before been seen, the first prototype module was also designed as a flexible data
collection device. That first module was intended to serve as both the bowling ball's eye
and its memory as it looked out through the finger hole and recorded what it saw while
the ball rolled down the lane. The basic assumptions and design for the embedded
software for the SMARTDOT module have been developed based on the analysis of that
captured data.
With the feasibility of the hardware established, the real problem at hand has been largely
one of software engineering. Although the module works as intended, this version has
been developed solely through the author's personal use and input. The development
phase of the project will involve a refinement of the sensor module, as described later in
the paper, followed by a limited beta test among a collection of bowlers with different
styles and capabilities. A subsequent refinement of the module's embedded software will
most likely follow to accommodate variations discovered during the beta test.
As for the PC-hosted MASTER software, the paper reports the results of, and the
conclusions drawn from, the various types of data analysis performed on the raw data
collected during this phase of development. The MASTER program was developed as a
custom data analysis and presentation application to facilitate review of sensor data under
a real-world scenario (i.e., during real practice sessions at a local bowling center), and to
apply the information extraction techniques presented in Section III of the paper. Based
on this preliminary analysis package, high-level design suggestions for the development
of the end-user application are included at the end of Section III.
6