How would you solve this engineering problem?

[yoursurrogategod]

Ok, my friend bounced this idea off of me at a bar, it's his problem and he's getting paid to solve it, but I'm still curious on how to best do this.

 

Basically, he works for a company that makes baseball pitching machines.  Recently, the company decided to make "smart" baseball pitching machines.  These machines would need to track each ball that gets pitched (I guess each ball has slightly different physical properties and that impacts how the ball flies).  Basically, a ball is thrown and the machine needs to know that ball serial number 2398402 has been pitched.  He's thinking of two possible solutions and their pros and cons:

 

1 - Have a number printed (or a bar code) on the ball and have this scanned.  This is a well-established and cheap solution. The downside is that it would have to have human involvement or have the ball somehow get scanned by the machine by being bathed in scanning laser lights (the likes of which you see in supermarkets) and then find out which ball this is.

2 - Have an RFID in the ball itself.  In this case, identifying the ball is very easy.  However, how would this work if a signal is sent out and then multiple RFID chips respond at the same time?  Or is my understanding of RFID incorrect?

3 - Have an operator enter manually the number printed on the ball.  This is very easy to implement, but error prone (fat-fingering), time consuming and just seems like a needlessly manual operation that a machine can do.

 

I'd be curious how you can do this automatically (maybe RFID?):

Machine: "Hey ball, what's your number?"

Ball 293929: "Why I'm ball 293929."

Machine: "Noted."

[Philip]

IMO RFID sounds like the way to go here. The ball can be in any orientation, the tag could be implanted inside (although care to not mess up the balance of the ball) - thus not rubbing / coming off, and a lot less prone to errors from manual input. 

 

As long as there is only 1 ball in the location that is getting scanned / read, you'd be fine. You can get a range of readers for different lengths. A few mm would work out here.

[Psycho]

I would say RFID as well, but I'd question the ability to "implant" them into the ball without affecting the properties of the ball or getting damaged from use. A barcode on the ball would not affect the ball at all, but it could get smeared or rubbed off. For a barcode, the ball could go through chamber where the ball is spun around until the barcode is read.

[ignace]

RFID increases production costs, where as barcodes provide a revenue stream. Every time the barcode wears off, they'll have to buy new barcoded baseballs. IMHO though I don't see why this would matter I don't care whether I swung ball A out of the stadium or ball B, just that I did.

 

I care more about the machine shooting the balls just like a pitcher would to practice my swing.