Robot Beats Humans in Air Hockey

Posted 10 Jul 2008 at 17:26 UTC (updated 10 Jul 2008 at 17:27 UTC) by jlin

Last week we brought you a podcast about a vision of robots beating soccer players. This week, we report the reality of a robot beating humans at air hockey. Designed by General Electric Fanuc and programmed by Nuvation Research Corp, the robot plays a mostly defensive strategy. Its vision tracking system send coordinates to a board every 10 milliseconds. Using 32-bit ColdFire microcontrollers and a C program, the robot will defend its goal, only attacking when it is confident about the puck's position. The developers claim that the robot has "defeated even the best human air hockey players by a ratio of three to one." There is a video of the robot.