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A Robot To Follow "Mother" And Another To Block Her
fireflash writes: "Some folks at MIT have had a bit of fun with robots. 'Mr. Mallard' and 'Roboguard' are robots that follow a homing beacon and guard hallways, respectively. Wouldn't you like to be followed around by a mess of wires and boards whilst attempting to pass through a hallway guarded by another? Sounds like the ultimate in home security to me :-)."
This is probably going to be needed real soon.. google mirror
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You have a large grid. You're placed in the middle somewhere. Scattered about the level are 'daleks' or 'robots', depending on how much trouble the author wanted with BBC. Each 'turn', you move one space; each robot moves one of the eight possible directions towards you one space. If two robots ended in the same space at the end of that turn, they died and left a pile of rubble. If a robot hit the rubble after moving, it also died. If a robot touched you, or you collided with the rubble, you lost. The idea was to have all the robots collide with other robots or rubble, and leaving you alive. Typically you'd have a limited number of 'teleports' that would drop you in a random location on the grid that you could use instead of moving.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
You play on a simple field (often times an 80x25 terminal window). Your intreped hero has no weapons (sometimes he has a single shot sonic screwdriver) and if any robot touches him he dies. You can only kill the robots by making them run into each other (where they'll leave piles of debris behind--and running into debris is also deadly for the robots!). The robots are very stupid, they always head in a bee-line to the player (at least as much as they can being constrained to moving in ordinal directions). Your hero's primary weapon is a teleporter that randomly teleports him to somewhere else in the playing field (including occasionally next to a robot). The game is over when a robot touches the player (usually when you teleport in right next to a robot). A somewhat feature lacking version can be compiled from here:
Hpux
I read the internet for the articles.
Holy crap, that Roboguard demo is... 173MB? Maybe they should put a size warning on that one, although my work's currently paying for my bandwidth, meh.
shut up man
Heh, I guess it was too obvious that I pulled that URL directly from the ports tree. FreeBSDers who really want to see the game in action (although I suspect many people will have the above sentiment: This used to think this was fun?!?) can: # cd /usr/ports/games/xrobots Adjust if your ports tree is elsewhere of course
/usr/games ./robots
/usr/ports/games/gnomegames
# make install clean
Or you can play the text version (it's part of the base BSD games):
% cd
%
Or you can install the gnome versions (not recommended unless you already have gnome installed, no point installing all of gnome for a couple of lousy games after all):
# cd
# make install clean
This should be enough robot on robot action for anybody.
I read the internet for the articles.
- Sorry about the slashdotting. Small server configuration error that's been fixed now. Browse away.
- Roboguard and friends were a class project; it wasn't DARPA or NSF funded, it was all for fun and a good grade.
:)
Our research group does networks and mobile systems research for our day jobs...
- The Cricket Project that was used in the "Mother" robot is part of our real research.
- Much of the robotics research at MIT happens in the AI Lab, so if you're curious about robotics, browse over there and see the things that the
Humanoid Robotics Group is doing. Very cool stuff.
-Dave