Laser-Tag Robot

What?
An interactive miniature desktop laser-tag robot! Made from a Lego EV3 brick, Lego components, and RobotC. As a final project for MTE100 and MTE 121 courses, the laser tag robot was a group effort with fellow Mechatronics students: Akshaya Thavakumar, David Yen, and Nithila Rajaratnam.

Game Play
A game of laser-tag is initiated when the player chooses between the specified game intervals on the robot interface. The robot then begins gameplay and navigates the desktop surface randomly while avoiding falling off table edges. The player uses the wireless gun to take shots at the robot. If the user shoots at the robot accurately, the robot will count a point and display the final score at the end of the game. If a player chooses to terminate the game before the specified game time ends, a killswitch located on the robot will end all programs when triggered.

How Does it Work?
The laser-tag system was comprised of 2 components, the robot body and the gun. The robot used 3 total motors (1 large, 2 medium) and had 4 unique types of inputs: an infared sensor, motor encoders, touch sensor, and an ultrasonic sensor.

  • Wireless gun: the robot was mounted with an infared sensor beacon and the remote contained the infared remote that sent signals when triggered.
  • Edge detection: an ultrasonic sensor was mounted to the robot body on a rotating arm and detected table edges. When an edge was detected and distance threshold was surpassed, a fall-back procedure was called and the robot backed away from the table edge and continued random movements.
  • Random movements: within the code for the robot, there were 3 fixed moves with variables that were chosen at random every time a new iteration of movement was initiated. The random movements continued until the game time ended.
  • Killswitch: within the software for the robot, there were various while loop to check for specific conditions, in these conditions was to check for if the killswitch (a touch sensor) had been triggered.

    • Skills Applied
  • C language programming
  • Sensor/ input knowledge
  • Project planning and organization
  • Software and mechanical project proposals/ demonstrations
  • Group collaboration/ leadership
  • Time management