The "bouncing ball" was called "Rover".
It was created to retrieve prisoners who were trying to escape.
There's a very interesting story about that.
Check out this site:

http://www.netreach.net/~sixofone/

Be seeing you.

It would only make sense then that this would be sent out to retrieve it when it bounced awry:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.techn...-15,RNWE:en%26sa%3DN