Robot Laser Tag

[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]

17 thoughts on “Robot Laser Tag

  1. 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

  2. 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.

  3. 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

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