We've seen
mixtures of Roomba and Pac-Man before, but nothing like this. A team of developers have hacked five floor-cleaning bots to create a sort of OCD version of the game, with the Pac-Man bot sucking up little white rectangles whilst being chased by robot incarnations of Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde. But, when the Pac-Man vacuum finds a power pellet those ghostly rovers turn blue and start fleeing. The tech is supposed to be a demonstration of the developers' Unmanned Aerial System suite, designed for guidance of airborne vehicles, but we're too busy geeking out to care about potential real-world applications of this tech. Video below.
Meh, they go over the lines :P
Cheaters!
They should use Nokia Xpressmusics as the edible dots.
WAKA WAKA WAKA WAKA WAKA WAKA WAKA WAKA WAKA ...
They go over the lines when they reset to the starting position... just like in real pac-man. ;)
Lines are only for the video; the ghosts dont use them.
Those guys sound very excited.
The autonomous ghosts are better at this game than the human pac man operator
Awesomeness is awesome. xD
http://incendo.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/pie_pacman_chart.png
It'd really get me going if they did Ms. Pac-Man!
I never understood why it wasn't just Pac-Woman .... :-(
Thought criminal!! *points @ nuck*
Do they have to stop and poop?
The one guy sounds like Roger Chang
Wow, suddenly my roomba feels horribly inadequate! Demands friends too. I on the other hand am inspired to get back into trying to get my lego NXT project interfacing with the Roomba again.
Why is google maps the background for their interface?
its supposed to be for unmanned aircraft, hence the "planes" flying over the water
Using maps is likely a plugin they're using to do ground truth calculations.
A bit funny (and lazy) they are using the ocean as their coordinate system...
ALSO:
WTH?
a. the video is speed up to make it look like it's game speed, when these things are moving like 1cm/s (in the real clips). That's KIRF
b. why not show a real 30sec game play, instead we see bits and pieces to make it appear "working" (that's Research KIRF).
c. UAVs? I would not trust a ordinance on a UAV that is what? *controlled by a Futaba transceiver*, likely running 2.4Gs... R/C hobby COTS for military stuff... no thanks...
@recharge95: The robots are actually driving at about 25cm/s. Only the first and last clip are sped up. Also, we originally made the video showing a long uninterrupted clip of the game, but people claimed that it was too long and not exciting, so we just showed cuts.
Last thing, most people that do real UAV research don't use R/C control (that's not really autonomous). We have on-board autopilots that have a primary 900MHz data link with a backup 2.4GHz link. But even if we lose both, the aircraft will come home and land itself (we have tested this).
Nice!
what happens when a cherry appears?
Everyone knows that Pac-man's mouth is supposed to hinge at the center of his face... body... thing!
This was a bit of a letdown for me. I was expecting something a little closer to an actual Pacman game. I thought the red tape would actually be functional as a barrier and that the ghost bots would really turn blue. I'm sure that could be done with some extra sensors added, some blue LEDs, and the necessary software tweaks. I guess that was not the purpose of the demonstration. I think the headline is misleading.