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Vegas Vaibo
Black Jack Dealer Extraordinaire
Leigh Ann Sudol, Dylan Hower, and Je Woong HeoCognitive Robotics Final Project Spring 2007
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Project
Description:
Vegas Vaibo is a combination of a variety of principles learned in
the Cognitive Robotics class. He deals with vision, kinematics, learning,
and involved much thought and work into optimizing his environment for the
problem posed (dealing blackjack)
Click the links below to find out more about each aspect of the problem.
Sony Aibo | The
Game of BlackJack | Tekkotsu | Vision | Motion | Intelligence | Group
Comments/Reflection | Future Work | Media Gallery | | Source Code
Media Gallery
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The Sony Aibo
The Sony Aibo ERS-7 is a Robotic Pet that can be programmed to
perform any series of actions. It contains a variety of motors and
sensors that can be controlled through the software.
More information on the Aibo can be found at:
Wikipedia
Sony
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The Game of BlackJack
The game of BlackJack is a game of chance where there is a statistically
correct strategy for playing. The Aibo plays the dealer role against a
single opponent.
The dealer deals a single card to each player (the aibo and himself) and then
one more to the player, and a face down card to himself. The player then
has the option to hit or stay repeatedly until he either goes over 21 or until
he is satisfied with his hand. The dealer then reveals his card and hits
repeatedly or stays. The player closest to 21 without going over wins.
More information on the game can be found at:
Wikipedia
BlackJack Info
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Tekkotsu
Tekkotsu is an open source development framework for the Sony
Aibo. Tekkotsu provides a framework for interacting with the robot on a
very high level. You can find out more information about Tekkotsu through
the link below.
Tekkotsu Homepage
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Vision
Vegas Vaibo uses vision to do a few tasks throughout the game.
Card Recognition - Before he deals to himself or players, he sees the
card and counts how many blobs are there in the card. To avoid seeing noises as
blobs, he sets the center point of the card and count the blobs around the
center with certain area only. Aibo recognizes face cards due to the other
colors present on a face card other than red or black.
Player Hit/Stay - The player communicates a hit or stay command to the
Aibo using either a orange or yellow easter egg. An orange egg indicates
a hit command and a yellow egg indicates a stay command.
References used in the card recognition:
IEEE Paper on Computer Vision and BlackJack
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Motion
Vegas Viabo uses several motion sequences in order to complete his
tasks.
DealPlayer - The DealPlayer motion sequence starts with Aibo having a
card in his mouth and moves him away from the Card Feeder, across to where his
opponent would be seated, drops the card and then returns him to the dealer's
home.
DealDealer - The DealDealer motion sequence starts with Aibo having a
card in his mouth and moves him away from the Card Feeder to his card pile to
his left. He drops the card and then returns to home.
GrabCard - The GrabCard motion sequence starts from alignment for
recognition. It then opens the jaw, raises the head, moves forward to the
card, and then closes the jaw to acquire the card.
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Intelligence
Vegas Vaibo has two states that require him to make decisions.
Win/Loss - when the player goes over 21, or after the Aibo has dealt
himself the win/loss state of the robot decides whether the player or dealer has
won. Because card recognition is done at the time of dealing, the Aibo
simply accesses the numeric value stored in his memory to decide the winner.
No vision is required for this operation.
Dealer Logic - This is the cognitive part of the Aibo. When
initially started he has a 50% chance of hit or stay for each numeric value
between 2 and 20. As he plays he updates percentages for each value so
that his choices become more intellegent over time. We used a file
written to the memory stick in order to record values and maintain changes over
time. For the demo we are presetting the weights for the aibo as they
would look after approximately 100 games.
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Group Comments/Reflections
Throughout the process of creating the dealer the group
encountered and solved a variety of problems. We endeavored to modify the
environment of the Aibo rather than change the rules of the game, and with the
exception of dealing all cards face up for recognition purposes we have stayed
true to the rules of blackjack, including the sequence of cards to be dealt -
dealing first the player, then the dealer and then the player again. We
modified one small aspect in that the dealer's second card is not dealt until
after the player chooses to hit or stay. Statistically, since the player
cannot see the second dealer's card until after they have hit or stayed there
should be no statistical difference on the outcome of the game.
Challenge #1 Card Manipulation - Since cards are flat and would be
extremely difficult for the Aibo to push on his own or to pick up we explored
many different options in terms of manipulating the cards. The following
are some of the options we explored on the way to our final solution.
* A card shuttle - The card would sit inside of a "boat"
shaped shuttle that could be pushed by the aibo. At this time we were
considering methods of card retrieval and discarded this as not feasable in
that the aibo could not easily retrieve the card.
* A card pusher - The card pusher was a construct that was built as a
enclosure for the Aibo that he could manipulate easily by hooking his chin over
part of the pusher. It allowed him to move cards forward, backwards, left
and right simply by moving himself and maintaining the chin posture. We
discarded this as an overcomplication of the problem when we decided not to
retrieve the cards.
* A card feeder - The card feeder is our final solution. It is
designed to be the optimal height for Aibo to be able to raise his chin and
pick up a card in his mouth. The cards are displayed at an angle so that
Aibo can also do card recognition before he picks up the card. In order
to solve ambient lighting problems we created a light bar above and centered on
the card. The light bar increased the lighting to make card recognition
more accurate, while reducing glare with the distance away from the card.
Challenge #2 Card Recognition and Lighting - We constantly ran into
difficulties with the ambient lighting and decided we needed a more consistant
form of light. This became a light bar that was placed on the card pusher
directly above the card. This caused too much of a glare on the card so when we
moved the lightbar to the card feeder we raised it above the card and
re-orientated the bar so that the lights run down the middle of the card.
Overall we feel that this project was an excellent choice as a final project.
It combines almost every topic covered in the course including vision,
motion, recognition, navigation, and cognition.
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Future Work
Future projects that continue this work could include:
Recognition of multiple opponents
Collection of cards after a hand
Recognition of number of chips involved in a bet
Distrobution/collection of chips after a hand
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