Colorado students make Roomba Pac-Man game

Some students at the University of Colorado-Boulder have taken a bunch of iRobot Roombas and made a live-action Pac-Man game.

The game isn’t just some nutty hack, either. The students made it to demonstrate developing for unmanned aerial vehicles. The Pac-Man Roomba is controlled by a player using a joystick — the ghosts are autonomous. The Pac-Man robot eats tape “pellets” along its path, including the special huge pellet that sends the ghost robots running in the other direction; and even acts out the death spiral Pac-Man does when he gets eaten.

This could open up a whole new cottage industry of robots jazzing up old games: PackBot Minesweeper, Predator-drone Space Invaders, Artaic Pictionary, Precision Urban Hopper Q-Bert, crazy robot baseball, Petman marathons, etc. Competitive BigDog/LittleDog racing at Wonderland could bring together animal activists, racing enthuisasts, the gaming industry, the tech community and maybe even the Nascar crowd. I’d like to see that industry networking event.

Posted by Brendan Lynch

Tags: iRobot, Roomba, University of Colorado Boulder

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 11:37 am and is filed under Defense, Education & Training, Massachusetts, robotics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.