Minnesota West Guitar Hero Robot

Article From Machine vision and image processing

Banner Engineering Corp. partnered with a Minnesota West Community and Technical College engineering student and robotics instructor to develop a robot designed to play the Guitar Hero video game—responding to each note as it appears onscreen. Pete Nikrin, who graduated from Minnesota West in 2008 and now works as a manufacturing engineer at Meier Tool & Engineering, designed the robot to compete with a friend that Nikrin had introduced to the game and, after playing for two weeks, had surpassed Nikrin in his ability. Bill Manor, robotics instructor at Minnesota West, suggested Nikrin incorporate a PresencePLUS P4 OMNI vision sensor with a right-angle lens from Banner Engineering. Manor had such a vision system in his possession, as Minnesota West had purchased it at a discount through Banner as a start-up education kit. To develop his Guitar Hero robot, Nikrin used a mannequin—complete with Minnesota West sweatshirt, hat and painted fingernails—and installed the camera lens as the robot's left eye, which would be positioned toward the TV or computer screen. The robot, named Roxanne, identified the notes to be played by using an Edge vision tool, which detects, counts and locates the transition between bright and dark pixels in an image area. For more information, go to: http://www.bannerengineering.com/en-US/ayrok.