San Diego - Cyth Systems' CythBot demonstrates their machine vision
capabilities on the wildly popular game, Guitar Hero.
The camera monitors the gaming screen as a human
would, recognizes what's coming, and about 100ms later
it plays what it saw. The computation of brightness is
done at 5 places on the screen, and is all done on the
small blue Compact Vision System from National
Instruments, running LabVIEW. It also outputs 5V TTL
signals, which we convert to 24V which drives the
pneumatic actuators. There are about 10 other ways to do
it, but Cyth found this to be the best. Version 2.0
of CythBot is already
in the works.
"Cyth engineers built the system in 8 days and spent
about 20 days fine-tuning," said Joe Spinozzi, Sr.
Director of Operations at Cyth Systems.
"The purpose is to turn heads. At trade shows where
there are 1000 booths with robots drilling holes or
cameras inspecting wires, this thing has standing crowds
of 50-100 people all day and gets loud applause! It also
shows our skills with assembly, vision systems,
pneumatics, embedded control, etc. But it was well worth
10x the cost just in the publicity it generates.
"On the other hand, it's built on serious technology
used in industry to automate manufacturing and product
testing. It's high-speed industrial hardware with a
Real-Time OS so people at these shows equate the system
with their own serious applications in mind. For
example, we can reboot the laptop and the system keeps
playing, which drew interest from a customer with a
requirement for redundant real-time controller."
EngineeringTV says, "Demonstrating Cyth Systems solutions, Cythbot is a
true Guitar Hero. The autonomous system can play the
wildly popular video game solo or in versus mode using a
Compact Vision System (CVS) and a Configurable Signal
Conditioning Enclosure (CA-1000) from National
Instruments.
"We have 5 groups of pixels on the screen
corresponding to the 5 notes we might need to play,"
says Ivan Gagne, Systems Engineer with Cyth Systems. "We
relied on the light intensity of the pixels in each of
those groups. We couldn't rely on the color of the notes
because during the game all the notes turn bluish white
when you activate star power. We also couldn't rely on
the shape of the notes because, at times, they turn into
stars. If that light intensity value exceeds a
predetermined threshold, we know we need to hold down
that key and actuate the strum bar after a predetermined
delay while the note travels down the screen to the
bottom "play line". If a note was there for more than
~1/4 second the machine activates the whammy bar to
score additional points on the sustained notes. There's
another threshold where the intensity has to drop before
it can consider the note "played" and therefore ready to
start playing another note. The imaging, the region of
interest, and the light intensity functions were all
built into NI's vision toolkit for LabView."
The CythBot was also reviewed by Wired.com. Read
their article
here.
