The DefconBots rules have been announced for Defcon 15. The reference design is actually pretty good on it’s own – I’m curious to see what sort of improvements the teams will come up with. The RD includes a full tutorial, so teams will definitely have a fighting chance. [via Midnight Research Labs]
The only rule is speed, so I wonder how many guns will feature multiple barrels. It seems that they don’t care how much ammuntion is used. (It does say no shotguns) Hrm, maybe a mini-gun that covers the 5×5 area with fine enough resolution to hit everything? Sure it lacks finesse, but firepower-a-plenty!
Now I can’t find his page but one of the Danger founders had built something similar using a Mac as the controller and a paintball gun. Of course, we’ve seen similar guns before.
first!
I, for one, welcome our gun-toting robot overlords. As a snitch, I may be helpful in rounding up other humans to lead them to their slaughter. In return, I only require insertion back into the Matrix.
Sounds like a great opportunity try and figure out how to project spots (laser? flashlight?) on the opponent’s side to confuse their bot. You don’t have to knock down all the targets…just more than your opponent. If your opponent’s bot is busy chasing projected spots rather than real targets. Or perhaps even have an arm that disrupts your opponent’s bot? There doens’t seem to be any rule that I noticed that prevents you from interfering with your opponent (as long as you don’t cross the firing line)…
Or you could just have your bot shoot the opponents bot and leave it at that…it looks like fun prehaps just an automatic gun that sweeps back and forth in a pattern until stopped would be more effective than a sniper type gun.
idea: flaming airsorft pellets
Better idea: flaming paint balls
best idea: flaming gnomes!
hm, i bet it’d be really easy to make somthing that works good, have a pulsed red led and webcam to aquire targets so it doesnt mistake somthing else for a target(is target round? check is target red? check is target flashing at a predefined rate KILL), switch to laser mode, aim and shoot
as it’d be automated in software i bet we could chuck gnomes at the targets pretty accuratly
From the SCORING rules “There may be black negative point targets to discourage random firing and shotguns”.
So some of the suggestions for mass firing wouldn’t work.