Society of Robots - Robot Forum
Software => Software => Topic started by: NOOBinDistress on August 30, 2007, 07:36:48 AM
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I am a total noob so this may seem like a stupid question to most people, but i was wandering if it would be possible to make a robot that can play paintball. For those of you who dont know what i mean... I mean speed ball... It is where you are in a small area with like 20 different blow up bunkers you can hide behind and shoot people from... I just thought meybe you could map where all of the bunkers are before hand... and either use heat sensors or motion sensors on the end of the guns to detect the oposing team and shooot them...The only problem with this is that it might pick up people outside of the playing field or its own team mates if it has any. Also i was wandering if you could use the other team s shirt color to pick up... I remember admin saying something about color sensing before... Anyway it is probobly a stupid question but my curiosity just got the best of me!
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Possible, yes. Costly and difficult - big yes.
That requires a lot of sensors, a huge budget, as well as patience and time. :-\
If you decide to build one please keep us posted on your progress.
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well i would like to... I am a noob and cant even get past the intro on this programing thing...right now im just struggling to finish the 50 dollar robot! but someday when i am not a total noob it would be a fun project...
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I think to start off you should break it down a little.
for Example: the gun, moblity, and then programming/ sensors.
Work on having the gun fire and aim, for aiming it'd be cool if u had the robot be able to aim at a certain cool...like red team and blue team. then after u have the gun firing at the desired target... design and build a mobile platform for it. and then after thats done you can work on having the robot sense an on coming shot and dodge it or some how aviod the amo making contact with the robot.
Its alotta work and i dont think a noob would be able to do it without help... thats wut the society is for right...helping fellow robotists?
It would be amazing to build sumthing like that... imagine this could led into robotic solider (which i think are already out) but if u where to build a working prototype...get a GOVERNMENT research grant build 4 or 6 of them and hav them fight against eachother and show the government that the robots can fight for thm selves... replicating the original should be easy as long as u keep the original program and change the red target to blue target or another colour.
Nate
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yah if i ever where to make something i would have used the exact approach you used aimin the guns and working your way down from there...
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and government research grants arent so easy to come along....
But if I would have 5 grand to spare I would build one...
the whole sensors bit would be a tricky
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Personally, for a paintball-related 'bot, I'd start smaller-it'd be a long, hard, expensive haul to build a little mechanical Ollie Lang. ;D
An idea that I had was to build some sort of paintball turret, either human controlled or using some sort of tracking software (Make your own, or use then numerous different variations floating around on the internet). Controlling the marker wouldn't be hard-a MOSFAT hooked into the marker's microswitch (Assuming you're using an electro-if you want to use a mech, just get a Firestorm crank and slap a motor on it and control it that way, but the electro is a lot easier to deal with). Plus, that's a reasonably simple project-control of two motors and a MOSFET, and maybe a camera if you decide to make it totally automated. Plus, it's been done several times before, so you could find resources pretty easy.
Plus, with a little paintball turret, you'd be damn popular in the scenario community-take one of these to OK D-Day or Blanding some year and set up in a defense scenario.
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NOOBinDistress, what you describe is entirely doable. I think I had the skills to do this after about 2 years of experience of me building robots . . . you will probably need $500 and you will need to learn computer vision . . . so after you finish your $50 robot I think you will be ready :P
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Hey,
It turns out that a buddy of mine is building a robot that shoots a Airrifle... its really neat actually...
nate
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There's a competition to make a robotic gun that can automously shoot down a series of targets:
http://defconbots.org/
http://colinkarpfinger.com/projects/defcon/
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you could theoreticlydo this with a simple heat sensor, but then it would shoot at anything with a body temp... hehe, my robot might just end up doing this with an electric airsoft gun lol.... were is the evil smilie???
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So what if you combined the heat sensors with PIR to track possible targets and RFID to PID friendlies. Once the bot saw a possible target, it could use a RFID scanner/ reader to scan the "unknown target". If it is friendly they would have an RFID tag on them which would respond as a friendly. An enemy would not have this RFID response which would signal weapons free!
Now how you would be able to signal that the other player has called himself 'out' and for the bot to stop engaging would be another question.
But baby steps, baby steps.
- Bill
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That would only work if the target was about a maximum of 2 inches away. RFID is VERY VERY limited in terms of distance. nice try though :)
Your best bet would probably be some kind of IR head band kind of thing
1) detect heat
2) look for IR signal
3) if none, fire
4) if IR = true, goto 1
you would have to give it some short term memory so it didnt detect the same guy over and over again lol
as far as detecting if a player has called themselves out , have a cube with a microphone at each vertex to triangulate where the word "Out!" or "Hit!" came from and if that angle is equal to target angle, cease fire.
Thats just my 2cents
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Athough RFID is very limited, I believe I read that the higher freq's have a range of a couple meters. Although it really dosn't matter as a speed ball feild is still more than a couple meters wide.
Since I still do not know a lot about programming, how quick could a bot do that search, interagation, then execution? P8 ballers are only out in the open for a few sec, if even that.
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yeah I know.
The only way to do this effectively (speed and accuracy) would require 2 super computers on-board and sensors out the wazoo.
But it can be done never the less. It just would take it a minute or so to identify friend or foe
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Just bring up an old subject,
www.curtbererton.com/research.html
Site about several robot projects which one of them is about 2x all robot teams playing paintball against each other.
Its a start...
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Noobindistress,
Look around for updates on my next project -
a RC tank with a remote camera and paint marker connected to a 2-axis turret.
Ive started collecting the parts already - using a "pre-built" (my butt) tank chassis, a cheap mechanical paint pistol with a solenoid, 4 servos (2 modified for continuous rotation for the drive motors, 2 unmodified for the turret), and Airtronics 6 channel transmitter/receiver. All of it's pretty straight forward except for how I am going to drive the solenoid - guess I'm going to have to do some programming after all. :-X
I also eventually want to have a "kill switch" target - you shoot it and it stops the tank. But the prototype is not meant to be shot at. for the prototype Im envisioning a lot of duct tape, zip ties and super glue.
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I can't remember the website cause I had it saved on my other computer in the states, but there is a website out there that is about RC Tank Combat.
They build 1/6 scale WWII tanks with paintball markers as the "barrel" and they go out in the local field and play against each other.
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I think you're referring to http://www.rctankcombat.com/ (http://www.rctankcombat.com/).
The construct some very cool robot tanks, have a look at this: http://www.rctankcombat.com/press/RobotFest2007/ (http://www.rctankcombat.com/press/RobotFest2007/)
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wow, those puppies are biiiig. Im thinking more of a 1/24 scale or so. Awesome stuff, tho.
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I went to RobotFest.
Pics and video of those tanks here:
http://www.societyofrobots.com/robotforum/index.php?topic=966.0