3D Robotics

Huge congrats to orginal ArduCopter developer Jose Julio, who won the Internet today with his awesome air hockey robot.

From I09

In an effort to suck the fun out of every activity still left for us puny humans, an engineer has built an amazing 3D printable air hockey playing robot that, in addition to moving across the required two dimensions, can predict the movements of rebounding pucks.

The robot was developed by Jose Julio who describes the system at his blog. Many of the components — like NEMA17 stepper motors, drivers, Arduino Mega, RAMPS, belts, bearings, and rods — are 'left over' parts from a RepRap 3D printer. The bracketry, puck, and paddle came out of a 3D printer. Julio built the table using off-the-shelf wood. The robot uses a PS3 camera to monitor the action.

This robot will utterly destroy you at air hockey

The camera is mounted above the table and it watched the puck to determine its trajectory. It then moves the paddle to the appropriate position to block and return the puck. It can even anticipate bounces off the wall. And in the event the robot is too good for you, you can always adjust the robot's speed to dumb-down its acceleration and strategy algorithms.

This robot will utterly destroy you at air hockey

Julio has even made the specs available at his website.

It would be interesting to see Julio's Air Hockey Robot pitted against the one developed by Namiki Labs — though that one only moves across one-dimension.

Yet another activity in which we don't stand a chance.

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Comments

  • Distributor

    Just amazing!

    A great work with artificial vision, the industries use the same method, you are a fantastic programmer buddy!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cajVzpJKjdw


    But you should install a difficulty select switch: master, hard, easy and kid... rsrsrs


    Congrats...

    Guto

  • T3

    Very cool!  Only problem I see, the robot wins all the time.  LOL  

  • Developer

    Thaks for the post Chris!! I have not seen it (Thanks Sandro for alert me)

    I love this community because I grew up as a maker here and there are very talented people here.

    Jose.

  • Best project I have seen in a long while!!

    You made my day :)

  • Very cool! Watching it move reminded me of a CAD plotter I used to have access to in an earlier version of my life. I love how it taunted at the end! Great fun. 

    For some reason at first before seeing this video, I imagined the paddle to be like a little hovercraft darting itself around the table. THAT would be cool!

  • genius!!!! 

  • Distributor

    yeah wow Jose!  again you rock! (but please do not merge the code with the Arducopter one... specially the Defense + attack part!) 

    hehe

    Nice! 

  • Developer

    Awsom :)

  • Jaja


    Eres un crack!

  • Simply outstanding!!

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