Artificial Intelligence robot, CSIS students play ball |
| Posted by Administrator on Apr 15 2009 at 3:24 PM |
By Brian Osler
Antelope Staff
Basketball seems like a simple game: project a ball through a round hoop. However, for Jacob Mason and Anne Hillebrand, it's a much more complicated task to program a robot to shoot and sink the basketball.
Mason, a senior computer science major from Lexington, and Hillebrand, a junior computer science major from Middleburg, Netherlands, have been writing software for the majority of this semester to control their artificially intelligent robot, Iky.
The goal? Iky must locate a small Nerf basketball through the use of sonar, grab it, find the correct position on the court and then catapult the ball through the rim.
The team researched the necessary steps to make Iky work, and then, while sticking within the confines of a budget, they ordered the parts and assembled the robot for the project in CSIS 441.
The assembly wasn't as difficult as the programming, according to John Hastings, associate professor of computer science and information systems. While the assembly only took two weeks, the program itself is still not completely done.
According to Hillebrand, the process is long and complicated. "Every time we changed something, everything got screwed up," she said.
The curve of the ball caused one of the problems the team had to solve. Hastings said that the curve of the ball caused the sound beams to bounce off at odd angles. This made locating the ball a real challenge to the team.
According to Mason, they used the catapult to shoot the ball because "it's really just what we got working. We tried several different things, and that worked."
"The whole project's been really interesting - kind of a good learning experience. You're dealing with something that has to interact with the physical world. It's a lot different than just writing software inside of a computer program where everything's very precise, easy to control. This is not," Mason said.
Iky is one of seven robots that will be put to the test Friday in Rapid City, S.D., as part of a conference for the Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS).
