Project info for GT PongBot

Created 20 Feb 2002 at 20:09 UTC by lilserf, last modified 20 Feb 2002 at 20:12 UTC by lilserf.

Notes: The SECON hardware competition is a yearly autonomous robot construction competition sponsored by the Southeast region of IEEE. The SECON 2002 contest requires each team to construct a fully autonomous Pong-playing robot. We're the Georgia Tech team, and this year the contest is run by the University of South Carolina.

Each robot gets a feed from an overhead digital camera, supplying an NTSC signal of the black-painted playfield. The ball is white, allowing for relatively easy detection.

The "paddle" portion of the robot cannot be more than 8 inches across. Basically, the robot is limited to behaving in the same way as the original Pong.

We're processing the NTSC signal using a Xilinx multimedia FPGA board, and our robot is controlled by a Motorola 68HC12 microcontroller.
Locomotion of the paddle is provided by a single 90 volt DC motor, controlled by a KB Electronics motor controller.
Our paddle is actual pinball paddle hardware, using a 50 volt solenoid.
Other sensors include emitter/detector phototransistors for position calibration and a 500 cps relative encoder.

Description: Pong-playing robot

This project has the following developers:

• lilserf is a Developer.
• gte910h is a Developer.