Guitar Heronoid
Guitar Hero is a popular rhythm game on the PlayStation 2 that was a hit and spawned several sequels. The players were able to rock to some of the most famous rock songs in the game by pressing the correct button and strumming the fret as the notes hit the line. It was customary for big groups of friends to play together until someone decided that it's now time for robots to rock to the groove!
Rafael Mizrahi and Tal Chalozin from GarageGeeks embarked on a project to create a robot that can play Guitar Hero. GarageGeeks is a registered group in Isreal that provides a space for like minded people to network and socialize together to brainstorm and realize imaginative non-commercial projects.
According to the creators, the robot was separated into two distinct parts, the "brain" and the "body". The "brain" processes the input and sends the appropriate response to the body while the body controls the finger movements.
The robot's vision is actually the video signal from the console fed into a computer. The computer then observes the image and analyses it to make the correct decision. Basically, the creators discovered that when the fret reaches the line, it will generate a graphic (explosion) that contains bright colours. Setting a threshold in the Brightness value when using the HSV colour space, the image can analyse and thus deduce which fret that has reached the line.
The "brain" than sends the signal to the listener on the "body". The listened forwards the signal to the control board which then moves the respective finger in response. The creators had to construct a 5 moving finger left hand to press the 5 buttons and a single moving finger right hand to strum the guitar.
Combining everything on a display window doll, and donning him with a cool Guitar Heronoid tee shirt, he is ready to rock!
It was an interesting experiment, especially to see what fervent passion and interesting ideas can mash and lead to. This is a simple robot that does too complicated but using computer vision to deduce an action and responding to it. While each individual parts may seem simple, the sum of all efforts is no mean feat! There are software challenges as well as hardware challenges, especially the construction of hands to resemble human beings is no easy task.
Although the Guitar Heronoid is not perfect, I will just start to get anxious when I play a game online with another player; is that a fellow human player at the other end, or a robot? Especially after just suffering a humiliating defeat!
Chua Chong Han (U045816M)
