The All-In-One Guitar Playing Robot and Game
Robots that can play games like Guitar Hero have been around for several years. But Intel and National Instruments have created a new demo that can run everything
With all the excitement surrounding the release of Guitar Hero 5 and The Beatles: Rock Band, I decided now was a good time to post a video I shot last month at National Instruments Week. In the past we’ve covered the way Guitar Hero could help amputees train brain-computer interfaces and how to turn the controllers into real musical instruments. It’s been over a year since we posted about Slashbot, a robot that could play the game.
Today’s video features another guitar-playing robot. But this one is different: the musical game (in this case, the open-source Frets on Fireclone), the vision acquisition system (that reads the notes off the screen), and the robotic control are all running off a single processor. Check it out:
This demo was a way for Intel and National Instruments to show off their new virtualization tool, which allows engineers to assign a specific task to a particular core. I thought it was a rather impressive way to show off the technology, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. Is this virtualization capability worthwhile?
Joshua J. Romero is a software developer and journalist. A former IEEE Spectrum senior editor, he holds a bachelor’s degree in astronomy and physics from the University of Arizona and a master’s in journalism from New York University.