Thursday, April 22, 2010

Tetris bot - How lazy are we getting? :)

Tetris-Bot is a Tetris-playing robot. Jay Leno would say "How lazy are we getting? Now robots play games for us!". Tetris-Bot consists of a camera, a TI DM6437 DSP board (running my embedded vision and artificial intelligence algorithms), and a three-finger NXT robotic hand (that presses the keys on the computer keyboard). I was inspired by the NXT Rubik and Sudoku solvers and the Segway-like NXT robots. Unlike them, Tetris-Bot is not an NXT-only system, because the Brick has a limited input bandwidth. That's why I use a TI DM6437 DSP board to analyze the images coming from the camera, recognize the new shape, and find the best place and orientation for it. The instructions are communicated to the NXT robotic hand via LEDs on the board.