“Ping-Tac-Toe” is one of the challenges from the game show “Minute to Win It” (http://www.nbc.com/minute-to-win-it/). The key challenge in this game is to bounce a ping pong ball off of a surface, through a window, and into a scoring bin, a cup. The player positions the balls to complete three in a row according to tic-tac-toe. A demonstration of game can be seen at (http://www.nbc.com/minute-to-win-it/how-to/ping-tac-toe/). In this modified version of the game called Robotic Ping-Tac-Toe, two robots will use a similar skill set to play a similar game in head-to-head competition. Watch overview in the video below.
Ping-tac-toe project overview produced by Preston Berkeley and Greg Stephens with input from the Fall CES102H class.
Spring 2011 Final Competition - Monday April, 18 2010
Winner
Team 3
Second
Team 2
Fall 2010 Final Competition - Friday November, 12 2010
Winner
Team 14
Competition Day
A group of students from the CES102H course (introduction of freshmen to the engineering profession and science disciplines) examined the projects for teamwork, design elements, implementation, lessons learned.
Q: We are considering a gravity fed design. You were really pushing the two wheels. Do you have any thoughts or advice?
A: You can use any design you wish but the spinning wheel design was very successful last semester. You don't have to use it exactly as is, for example you could adapt the basic mechanism and rotate the shooter instead of trying to curve the balls. What we learned last semester is there are repeatability problems in any design where the ball must travel through a tube during the launch. As the ball moves down the tube it will randomly contact the sides of the tube and the speed will change. In addition, a ball in a tube will create a vacuum that will also affect the speed of the ball. The smart thing about the Dexter design is that the last contact with the ball is through the launch rollers; thus, if the launch rollers are running at the proper speed and the grip on the ball is consistent then the mechanism should launch the ball at a known speed. It does seem possible to produce a reliable gravity fed design, e.g, using a cage style launch tube, but you must overcome the problems that we observed last semester for this approach to be successful.
Image Database : A set of images with different configurations of the game board has been collected for evaluating image processing algorithms for Ping-Tac-Toe. [ZIP]
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)