Tic-Tac-LEGO: an investigation into coordinated robotic control

  • Authors:

  • Ruben Vuittonet;Jeff Gray

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL;University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 44th annual Southeast regional conference
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The Lego Mindstorms Robot Command eXplorer (RCX) is a popular robotics kit that provides an opportunity to explore embedded software control. The limitations of the RCX provide a direct challenge that is typical of real-world embedded system development. This poster summary describes the Java-based development of a set of robots that coordinate to play the game of tic-tac-toe. Three key challenges were investigated in the project: 1) recognition of the state of the game board, 2) computation of the next-move within a reasonable timeframe using robots working in parallel, and 3) navigating a robot to the proper board location to mark the desired move. Game board analysis takes the form of a robot that performs optical scanning. A min-max tree algorithm was implemented in the primary control robot to determine the next best move. Specialized components affect the physical movement of the robots and mark the appropriate tic-tac-toe cell.