[Shay] and his friend built some battling robots for a school project. Instead of destroying each other’s robots with saws or torches, they are playing laser tag. Each robot sports an eeePC, a laser pointer on a movable arm, and some photoresistors. The goal is to get your laser to hit the other robot’s photoresistor to lower its health towards a kill. A server keeps track of the bout, monitoring shot fired because you won’t find unlimited ammo in this game. As for piloting the rig, the netbook webcam is streamed to a control station with an Xbox 360 controller for motion, aiming, and firing. Check it out after the break.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqZ_a-yW2os]
effing awesome machine!
Given the fact that it’s a robot with a cool glowing red “eye,” it really should be written in Android ;)
Nice- now add some AI so the robots can hunt each other.
@Amos: You are thinking of “Motorola Droid” (HAL9000 thingie), not “Android” (cute green guy).
Please repost sans teeny bop music.
There’s no dialog in the video, so just hit the mute button.
cool project for kids
but
really? if I strap a laser pointer and a laptop to a RC car can I call it a robot too?
this is similar to a project i suggested you could do with those spy TRAKR cars
maybe they should just use those rather than sitting a laptop on a cart
wonder why they didn’t just show it playing the game and not just goofing around
@osgeld-for once, I totally agree with you. Robot-like? Yes. Robot potential? You betcha. Robot? No more so than the RC tanks you can buy on thinkgeek.
Hello guys and thank you for your comments (I’m Shay), I actually did posted a video about the robot
battle itself, just check out the Youtube channel.
It has 2 more videos showing the robot in a battle and being motion controlled using the Nokia N95 accelerometer.
LOL @ stolen CS sounds :D
What would be awesome is adding some augmented reality so that the ‘robots’ can blow up on the computer screen, have a name tag above them etc.
The volume control, IT DOES NOTHING!!
Oh wait…there we go.
Sorry.
Not a new idea, we were doing this in 1993. Granted we did it with chips and processors not cheating by using a freaking laptop.
I built 2 using 6809 processors, some logic and a pair of H bridges.
The school had black wall to floor borders so simple CDS cells worked well as wall detectors. indstead of “lasers” we shot encoded IR beams collimated with a simple IR led+brass tube and a lens.
Less than 900 lines of code in assembly to avoid walls, search for the other robot (both bots had led beacons) and attempt to get close enough to kill. After a kill the other bot became the hunter and the other became the prey until a time limit was triggered then both go into hunter mode.
and I stole my design out of a old BYTE magazine as a base and modified from there. Gotta love the days when you blew a eeprom to program your computer/bot
If they polish up that robot they cood easily take that to a toy company. Their software looks really awesome.
Red Eye=Hal 9000
Really awesome project, looks like a fun end product too!
@osgeld
yes