Pong playing robot
posted Feb 2nd 2009 12:34pm by Caleb Kraftfiled under: robots hacks
Sometimes, it can be very difficult to find a partner to play pong. Lets face it, pong just isn’t worth playing alone. Someone has come up with the perfect solution, a robot built specifically for playing pong. It watches the “ball” with a web cam and presses the appropriate buttons on the keyboard with its tentacle like arms. It is vaguely reminiscent of the switchboard operators from Men In Black, and definitely overkill for the job. You may notice there seems to be some performance issues with their game of pong. I doubt that the game itself is that taxing, but the same computer is controlling the robot as well.
Half of the time, if it wasn’t overkill… it wouldn’t be worth watching.
I am a little confused about the robot moving it’s “head” around since it should be able to see the entire playing field from a neutral centered position. My guess is that an old/slow laptop is really to blame for the performance issues… running the robot AND pong shouldn’t cause those types of performance issues unless it is very old.