Feature: 5 Incredible Game-Playing Robots

Don’t have a friend around to play a game of Checkers? Then it’s time to fire up the trusty robot.

Connect Four

TeamHassenplug created this interesting Lego robot that plays Connect-Four. It’s powered mainly by 2 x RCXs w/AC adapter, 4 x motors, 2 x rotation sensors, 5 x Mindstorms touch sensors, 1 x 16MHz processor, 1 x light, and 5 x Cybermaster touch sensors. How good is it at playing? This is what the creator had to say:

During most days, where it will play for up to eight hours at a time (close to 100 games), I can usually count the number of times it lost on one hand.

Rubik’s Cube

This follow up to the RuBot is the next-generation of Rubik’s Cube solving robots. Plus, it plays robotic sounds while solving the cube — how cool is that?

Pong

A LEGO fanatic created this Mindstorms robot capable of playing a Pong-like game. Here’s what its creator had to say:

I have a webcam and it’s controlled through infrared using a laptop computer. There’s no tricks.

Tic-Tac-Toe

The Philips iCat robot “interacts with the user in a natural way by understanding spoken requests, giving replies, recognizing faces or everyday objects and by using body language such as facial expressions, nodding and other head movements.” Video after the jump.

iCat can playback audio, photo and video content from multiple sources such as PCs, Internet or other storage devices. Its intelligence is made possible by an advanced software architecture

Checkers

Students at the Polish-Japanese Institute of Technology created this checkers playing robot, which features a “Motoman-based system, an electromagnet, a CCD Camera, frame grabber, QNX real-time OS, and C powered software”.