I am an old catcher and now even older father. I have one boy. It is getting more and more difficult to bend down to catch. It is also difficult to find someone to play catch with at the same level as my son. I have designed a simple "catching" machine. You have several baseballs in a queue, throw to a backstop. This will trigger the next ball to lightly be thrown back to the thrower using high pressured air. The pressure can be adjusted depending on the skill level and distance of the thrower. You can make it more advanced by adding pitch count, speed and ball or strike using some laser tech. The "throw back" arm can also be detached and used without the apparatus to "throw" ground balls. It is very difficult to find able bodied fathers or catchers.
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This sounds interesting, but I can't tell from the description how it actually works. How exactly does it catch the balls?
My brother pitched to an elastic screen/net in a frame. It sat at an angle, so when he pitched, it would bounce the ball back as a pop-up.
You say that you've already designed this. Did you build it? It might be easier to just use the above. Sounds like you need pressure sensors, triggers, some sort of catching apparatus. Complex.
I don't think able-bodied fathers are scarce, it's just that we already have a list of things to do. Playing ball is hard to make a priority.
If you could find the right materials, you could probably rig something robotic to retrieve (or even catch) the ball, tied to an electric eye. A large backstop would work just as fine. It would return the ball to an adjustable "gun" that could launch the ball in a variety of ways.