Building a Robot that Can Play Angry Birds on a Smartphone, (or Robots are the Future of Testing)ΒΆ

Presenter: Jason Huggins

Track: V

Description:

Can your robot play Angry Birds? On an iPhone? Mine can. I call it “BitbeamBot”. It started as an art project, but it has a much more serious practical application: mobile web testing. To trust that your mobile app truly works, you need an end-to-end test on the actual device. BitbeamBot is an Arduino-powered open-source hardware CNC robot that can test any application on any mobile device.

https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/presentation/470/

Gave a demo of the robot playing angry birds (big apploause)

The name of the project is bitbeam (bitbeam.org)

The original idea was to build a robot fish, after the robot dog from sony in 1998

  • fish swim in a sine wave

  • while researching sine waves he became fascinated with 3d simulations

  • liked the motorized pin art and had the idea of building 3d simulations using them
    • to buy the parts was very expensive, so he designed his own linear actuator
    • realized the linear actuator could be used for clicking buttons / testing
  • currently works at Selenium and is hoping to make bitbeambot selenium powered

Why?

  • selenium is a software-based robot

  • it’s mission is to mimic and automate user actions

  • for mobile you this means you have to integrate with the device

  • this is an experiment to take Selenium out of the screen and into the real world

  • using opencv is find the ‘bird’ in angry birds
    • eventually wants to use this to have the bitbeambot be more robust in playing the game and in future uses
  • shows an example of the bot playing tic-tac-toe

This talk was full of demos, check out the video when it’s posted.