And it's a surprisingly talented opponent, at that. Father-of-the-year, anyone?
A robotics hobbyist and lover of DIY-projects, Jose Julio wanted to know if he could hack the components from a 3D printer and turn them into something different. Inspired by his daughter's love of air hockey, he decided to see if he could build a her a robotic opponent – and the AHRobot was born:
The air hockey table he built himself, and the parts for the robot – i.e. the various electronics, motors, drivers, bearings, belts, etc. – came from standard Rep Rap 3D printer parts. He developed the robot's color-sensing vision system, trajectory prediction and playing strategies in C using OpenCV libraries, and implemented them with an Arduino microcontroller.
One of the coolest things about this project: Julio has released detailed build and code instructions for the table AND the robot under GNU General Public License v2.0. He goes on to list several of the project's other virtues and potential applications in detail on his blog:
- Reproducible: Easy to get the materials, documentation, source and open hardware ...
- Transportable: The robot is completely disassembled with only 6 screws. So you can play or disassembled for transport.
- Adaptable: It is very easy to adapt the level of play of the robot, for example to play with children, just down the acceleration and maximum speed of the robot (this could be improved in the future or even to be dynamic)
- Currently the robot detects no goals but could pose a sensor for it (future).
- In the future, the robot can self-calibrating the camera using predefined baseline (avoid the camera calibration) movements.
- Competitions: The table allows to place 2 robots, one on each side. Competitions between robots?? At the end everyone could have your code with the strategy and compare different strategies in a tournament ...
- Science: It's a great and fun project to teach science and especially children:
- Concepts of Physics: Friction, continuous and uniform movement, rebounding, concepts of position, velocity and acceleration
- Math Concepts: Equation of the line through two points, prediction, XY Cartesian System
- Robotics Engines, Machine Vision, Control Arduino.
- Philosophy DIY: Build Your Own Air Hockey table!
- Hacking: Using parts of a 3D printer to build something completely different.
So just how good is the robot? According to Julio AHRobot can beat a child with ease, but will typically lose to an adult with moderate air hockey skills – though he suspects this will change as people continue to work on the robot's programming and visual systems.
"The project is fully alive and undergoing improvements, both in code and in the robot," he writes. "Any contribution to the project is welcome."
Visit Julio's awesome blog, Ciencia y Cachero (Science and Homebrew), for more details. (Fair warning: this place is a major DIY-timesuck.)
ht Carlitos!
onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This guy built his daughter an air hockey bot out of 3D printer parts