Submitted version of the thesis - Airlab, the Artificial Intelligence ...

Chapter 6
Game
The robot will be used as a testbed to develop robogames. As a testbed a
simple game is implemented, using almost all the components available on
the robot. The game is used also to verify the correctness of the solutions
implemented. We created a simple game to test the robot. Basically, the
robot has to go to several targets in a sequence, by avoiding obstacles, until
the final target is acquired.
The game flow can be expressed in a better way with an algorithmic
approach. The class diagram is shown in Appendix A.1 and the flow diagram
in Appendix A.2. The microcontroller starts by controlling the game
end status. The game end status is composed of conditions. First, it checks
whether the target is acquired. If it is acquired then it also checks whether
this is the last target and ends the game by staying at the current position.
If it is not the last target, the algorithm steps from the game status check
phase and continues the search. Before performing any other operation the
collision status is controlled. If a collision is detected, a proper command is
sent to motors to get rid of the obstacle.
The next step is blob search, and blob tracing. The camera searches for
the target at its vision side. If no blob is found, the robot performs a turn
around its center of rotation until a blob is found or a collision detected.
Normally, the collision should not be controlled for the turn around the
center of rotation but, as we discussed previously, we cannot guarantee the
correctness of the movement since we lack encoders for the motors. When a
blob is found, the first step is checking the color information of blob, since
the difference between targets is made by the color information. If the cor-