Air hockey is traditionally a two-person game, but not at Jose Julio’s house. He decided to use some parts made for the RepRap 3D printer to build a makeshift air hockey robot. The results are impressive — the robot can defend, attack, and mix the two strategies in an attempt to vanquish its human opponent.
Julio used RepRap parts simply because they are readily available, inexpensive, and easy to modify. He made use of the stepper motors, belts, and a few other parts from the printer. Of course, there are also some 3D printed pieces in the contraption. The smarts come by way of an Arduino Mega microcontroller with custom software written by Julio.
For the robot to return the puck, as dictated by all those lines of code, it needs to know where it is. A Playstation 3 camera mounted above the table gives the robot its visual acuity, allowing it to calculate the trajectories of each move and pick the best strategy.
It has the skill to defend its goal very well and can beat inexperienced players. However, someone with air hockey skills can usually beat the robot eventually. With a little tweaking, Julio believes the robot will get much harder to defeat, possibly even besting the most skilled human players. I, for one, welcome our new air hockey robot overlords.
If you want to make your own air hockey bot, the code is on GitHub. Contributions to the project are also welcome.