Autonomous Foosball! (plus)

posted Dec 12th 2007 11:15pm by Will O'Brien
filed under: misc hacks

[Shane ] sent in GATech’s senior design final projects, but his Autonomous single player foosball table is awesome. A Java app tracks player and ball via webcam. Then it acts as the opposite player by controlling servo actuated paddles. He’s copied his project to his personal server, just in case the class files get pulled next semester.
The course page is pretty ugly, but the project pages aren’t. It’s worth some time to check out the rest of the projects. The 2d iRobot based mapping system looks interesting, but lets be honest, the hand washing detector should be mandatory federal equipment at every fast food restaurant.

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Comments [15]

Reader Comments

This is a nice hack. More like this.

It would be greatly improved if he were to use faster/stronger stepper motors instead of small servos, and build the control into the table rather than doubling the size.

Posted at 12:42 am on Dec 13th, 2007 by Crash

At last! Someone who plays foosball worse than me.

Still neat.

Posted at 12:43 am on Dec 13th, 2007 by wirehead

You may also check out this professional kickrobot:
http://www.f07.fh-koeln.de/fakultaet/personen/professoren/jens.krah/00085/

Posted at 2:35 am on Dec 13th, 2007 by Kaputzke

I don’t feel justified in commenting about the mechanical performance of the setup, as they address those concerns (mostly by the fact that they aren’t mechanical students :P). As a whole, that’s pretty inspirational.

Posted at 2:58 am on Dec 13th, 2007 by dax

Nice hack~!

I’d figure the fps rate of the webcam has to be bloody high. I couldn’t even see where the ball was heading when I started playing.

Posted at 4:22 am on Dec 13th, 2007 by yuzo

those are only proposals as far as i can see.. so this means the projects are to be completed within the following semester? if so, there are some badass proposals there and i would love to see what they come up with.. gatech is a great school and i’m sure they will find a way to impress..

Posted at 5:16 am on Dec 13th, 2007 by norm

ILL

Posted at 9:09 am on Dec 13th, 2007 by Jim

I just graduated from Georgia Tech’s Electrical Engineering program and the senior design class is only a one semester class. You have to present a proposal by the second week of class, followed by a mid-semester review of the project. By the end of finals week you need to demonstrate to the professor the functionality in the proposal and provide a final report. All in one semester. They work you hard at GT.

Posted at 9:26 am on Dec 13th, 2007 by Kevin DeMarco

The webcam was bought with the intention of it being 90fps but was actually 30max and had to be reduced further to 15fps for the resolution they needed. Very nice work given the constraints of mechanics and money!

Posted at 4:10 pm on Dec 13th, 2007 by m4lki3r

I was recently at GT and will (hopefully) be attending GATech next semester, during a tour of the EE lab I saw this project and was very impressed by it (even though it was not working or even assembled fully at the time).

Congrats, it’s neat to accidentally stumble upon it on this site (Knew what it was as soon as I saw the picture in my feed reader!)

- Leif

Posted at 4:11 pm on Dec 13th, 2007 by Leif902

I wonder why they were getting 15fps max at 320×240. My cheap logitech cam will do 28/29 at the same res.

Now they just need to port things over to C++ and use openCV…

Posted at 10:30 am on Dec 14th, 2007 by Colin

Handwashing detection… heh, McDonalds would be screwed. Nobody washes their hands as often as they’re legally required to (a bell goes off every X minutes… and nobody moves).

Posted at 3:01 pm on Dec 14th, 2007 by Groxx

Informated Article… Appreciated!

Posted at 6:55 am on Dec 17th, 2007 by Shabby

Interesting,,, however this project was done for senior design a few years ago at UIUC. I was in the lab a few days ago and saw almost exactly the same thing – except it used stepper motors.

Posted at 12:00 pm on Dec 19th, 2007 by Kman

Happy Christmas to All!

Posted at 3:44 am on Dec 21st, 2007 by Jeff