Air hockey is a fun game, but it’s one you can’t play by yourself. That is, unless you have a smart robot hockey player to act as your rival. [Zeroshot] built exactly that.
The build is based around a small 27-inch air hockey table—not exactly arcade-spec, but big enough to demonstrate the concepts at play. The robot player moves its mallet in the X and Y axes using a pair of NEMA17 stepper motors and an H-belt configuration. To analyze the game state, there’s a Raspberry Pi 3B fitted with a camera, and it has a top-down view of the board. The Pi gives the stepper motors commands on how to move the mallet via an Arduino that communicates with the stepper drivers. The Pi doesn’t just aim for the puck itself, either. With Python and OpenCV, it tries to predict your own moves by tracking your mallet, and the puck, too. It predicts the very-predictable path of the puck, and moves itself to the right position for effective defence.
Believe it or not, we’ve featured quite a few projects in this vein before. They’ve all got their similarities, and their own unique quirks. Video after the break.
[Thanks to hari wiguna for the tip!]
People should spent their free time developing robots to help in tasks like intelligent agriculture, medicine or carbon-free manufacturing technologies, not on stupid toys that benefit nobody.
The skills learned while playing come out later while developing something “useful” (following your definition of useful, not mine)
You must be fun at parties.
A lot of people do, search for the agbot challenge (there are others as well that is just an easy one to find because Purdue puts it on). Don’t blame others if you don’t even know about these things.
On a side note to actually do intelligent ag robots the dollar amount invested is insanely higher than what was done here even at the smallest levels.
Why is there so much slack in the belts? The whole frame wobbles and the puck moves with very noticeable lag.