Autonomous Robots Are Playing Dodgeball in Colorado

Since 2002, the University of Colorado has offered a class in Mechatronics. What might the dedicated student learn in Mechatronics? How to build a giant human-shaped robot capable of doing battle with nuclear Japanese dinosaurs? Nope, even better. This year, Mechatronics students built a bunch autonomous dodge ball-playing bots with infrared vision. 

It’s not quite the frenzied rubber-burning highlight of middle school P.E., but robot dodgeball is still a hell of a game. According to the university newspaper, class is divided into 11 teams, each of which must build their own robo-dodgeball warrior. At the end of the semester, there’s—obviously—a dramatic, high-stakes tournament. 

Two robots are placed in a small arena in a university lab. That arena is littered with orange Ping-Pong balls. The autonomous robots are dropped into the tiny dungeon for four minutes, whereupon they set about collecting the balls and hurling them at the opposing robot. No remote controls allowed: the dodge bots run according to programs designed by the students. They’re outfitted with an infrared vision sensors that look for green or red lights on the other robot—once it has an affirmative, its onboard microprocessor initiates a motor that sends the dodge bot into battle. The efficacy of its infrared array is the key component in robo-dodgeball warfare, it turns out.

The Daily Camera reports that the king of the dodge bots was a robot called ‘The Shredder’, which was outfitted with 10 different sensors:

One robot named “Meg” after TV’s “Family Guy” character suffered a brutal 17-7 defeat to “The Shredder.” Meg got stuck and couldn’t seem to get moving again, while her creators watched helplessly from the sidelines.

“(The Shredder) is the best robot by far,” said Eric Phaneuf, one of Meg’s creators. “They have 10 vision sensors and we have one. We can’t track them, so that was pretty much it.”

Which should really be the second lesson of Mechatronics, after ‘arm your dodge bot to the teeth with infrared eyeballs’: when you’re building a robo-athlete bent on dodgeball domination, it’s got to have a respectably robo-apocalyptic moniker. The bot named ‘The Shredder’ is always going to beat the one called ‘Meg.’