Patent ID: 8287404

Claim:
A tennis fungoman consisting essentially of: an automated tennis ball delivery control system consisting essentially of programmable logic controller in control of a drive motor, elevation motor, a ball feed motor and a pair of ejection wheel motors; and a tennis ball delivery unit capable of feeding one or more tennis balls from below the tennis fungoman consisting essentially of a frame, a tennis ball storage container positioned about the frame, a rotatable support mast that extends from the tennis ball storage container comprising a rotatable fitting, a drive motor connected to the rotatable fitting to rotate the rotatable support mast about a vertical axis formed through the center of an internal ball feed channel, a tennis ball ejection mechanism supported by the rotatable support mast comprising a pair of adjacent wheels rotated by a pair of wheel motors for ejecting one or more tennis balls, an elevation motor connected to the tennis ball ejection mechanism for tilting the tennis ball ejection mechanism in a vertical plane, the internal ball feed channel positioned within the rotatable support mast to extend from the tennis ball storage container to the tennis ball ejection mechanism, and a tennis ball feed motor connected to a propeller in the tennis ball storage container, wherein the tennis ball storage container is positioned below the tennis ball ejection mechanism, wherein the automated tennis ball delivery control system controls the tennis ball feed motor to feed one or more tennis balls into the internal ball feed channel positioned within the rotatable support mast to the tennis ball ejection mechanism for ejection, the automated tennis ball delivery control system controls the drive motor to rotate the rotatable support mast about the vertical axis to the desired position, the automated tennis ball delivery control system controls the elevation motor to pivot the tennis ball ejection mechanism in a vertical plane and the automated tennis ball delivery control system controls the pair of ejection wheel motors to provide the desired velocity and spin for the automatic launching of a sequence of tennis balls with top spin or back spin, while automatically rotating toward different player positions during a sequence, wherein the control system directs the three dimensional delivery of the baseball based on user defined parameters into a three dimensional space.