Roomba Pac-Man Is Pac-Man In Real Life
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 10 of November , 2009 at 4:04 am
“What better use for automatic home appliances than to have them chase each other in classic video game style? “
Pacmba may have been a Roomba that looked like Pac-Man, but for all intents and purposes, these iRobot Create robots are the game of Pac-Man. There’s Inky, and Blinky and Pinky and Clyde, and a bunch of little white dots to suck up… The ghosts behave just like they do in the real game, and Pac-Man can send them packing after eating a power pellet.
The hardware and software behind this game is actually pretty impressive. The designers of the system are from the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (or RECUV), and Pac-Man was just something they whipped up to showcase their Unmanned Aerial System software suite. This begs the obvious question of when we’re going to see a real life version of Pac-Man in three dimensions, with flying Roombas chasing each other through a matrix of interconnected horizontal and vertical passages. And for that matter, when are we going to see flying Roombas at all? The tops of my bookshelves are dusty.
But I digress.
The research coming out of RECUV looks pretty interesting, with projects investigating how to do things like efficiently control a swarm of different UAVs, each with different objectives. Personally, I always like to see people who work on robots taking their free time and working on robots even more, just because robots are incredibly awesome. Especially when they’re Pac-Man. Waka waka waka.
[ Roomba Pac-Man ] VIA [ Engadget ]
Comments (1)
Category: DIY, Novelty, Pop Culture
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Comment by henrik
Made Tuesday, 10 of November , 2009 at 5:42 am
imagine that the whole house is a megalabyrinth and the 5 or more roombas are playing pac-man around you. it would be freaking amazing