Pong Playing Robot

[vimeo=1564591]

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.

11 thoughts on “Pong Playing Robot

  1. 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.

  2. It’s a toshiba 4600. Running at around 1ghz (maybe a little bit above) and standard 256 mb ram.
    Running windows xp, vision software, and a game of pong on the side, it’ll have performance issues.

  3. It seems that the performance issues stem from the robot following the ball and adjusting its paddle position. Looks like if it’s moving right, it doesn’t bother following it, but if it’s going left, it checks its position every few seconds and calculates where the paddle should be.

  4. if the robot is being controlled by the computer.. and the pong is being played by the computer.. then couldn’t the robot technically beat the computer by cheating itself? or vice versa? hard to determine a real winner in that situation.

  5. I don’t know bolke, i’ve never had performance issues like what I see in the video. I’ve done dozens of projects involving vision software (even stuff I did in a hurry that was very inefficient) with multiple motor output and I usually use old 1Ghz machines I have lying around.

    That must be one processor intensive game of pong! :D lol

  6. It is me again just forgot to check email comments checkbox…

    Been trying to buy a couple of these Solenoid Switches which helps the robot pressing the keys but no luck… Anybody knows where i could buy some??

    Cheers guys

  7. Well I watched the video again and I just noticed the robot only moves its head in celebration after hitting the ball. When I made my earlier comment I thought it was actually moving the head to try and follow the ball. My bad.

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