Game Play Bots

** by Team Z (group 9)**

Inspiration

Game bot Playing games is very entertaining, it helps people improve their mental health. That's what came to mind when we prepared our idea for the robot.

What it is supposed to do

Game bot Using image filtering technology, the Game bot should ultimately play any board game with a human player. It finds each game piece, calculates which piece it should play next and move the piece using its robot arm. https://youtu.be/WxS8ZPWqFzQ

Play bot Pick up objects and deliver them to their owners.
https://youtu.be/uCF28Nm1K6A

What the robots can do right now

Game bot The robot plays Five in a Row. The Game bot can use a webcam to take pictures and recognize a go board. It can recognize black and white pieces (under optimal lighting conditions). It can also calculate which position the bot should move next. We can also manually control a robot to move around and collect pieces on the playing field

Play bot This bot can currently move around and moving other magnetic pieces around (it can lift light weight objects). This bot uses the ZX gesture sensors to give command to the bot.

How we built it and challenges

Game bot We used an Android TV box with a webcam to take images and calculate what the robot should do. We also built a robot that uses a vacuum to pickup and move game pieces. The communication between the robot and the TV box is completed through Bluetooth. The TV box sends a command for the robot to execute. One of the challenge we faced was the vision processing. Due to the uneven lighting of the board, we must tune the algorithm to the correct values in order to create enough contrast to find the board and the pieces. However, the biggest challenge was the insufficient amount of time for all the details.

Play bot We assembled an arm on top of a tank so that the robot can move over some items. An Arduino is used to take input from 2 zx gesture sensors. Then it would control each motor to move according to the input from the gesture sensor. A challenge that we overcame already was the fact that the two gesture sensors' inputs were confused with each other. We solved that problem by giving the two sensors two different identifications.

If there was more time

If we had more time we would improve our algorithm for the Game bot and make the Play bot go wireless (so we wouldn't have to drag wire around to control it).