The World Enjoys Robot Poke-chaos (World Plays Robot)

Twitch Plays Pokemon, but with robots! Also, you can play by text message.

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Inspiration

Twitch plays pokemon, RobotWars, LEGO. We basically wanted to make something very stupid. Also, we also really wanted to check out React.js!

What it does

Players from around the would collaborate to control a single robot using chat messages. Through Twilio integration it is also possible to control the robot via text messages. As we said - Stupid!

How we built it

We have an express.js backend server on top of which runs a react.js frontend. The frontend polls a Twilio chat instance and parses user inputs into control signals for a LEGO Mindstorms robot with the communication being done over bluetooth. Finally, a smartphone has been configured to send a live feed of its camera to the frontend, so users can see what the robot is doing, no matter where they are.

Challenges we ran into

The combination of browserify and reactify made things a lot more difficult than they had to be. As such, everything took significantly more time to accomplish than initially estimated.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It actually works! Having been able to create a functional product despite all the issues we ran into is something we are really quite proud of.

What we learned

React seems like fun, but one should be careful using to many new and unknown libraries when on a very tight time schedule.

What's next for The World Plays Robot

Battlemode! Having multiple robots fighting each other would not only be quite fun in itself, it would also provide more purpose to the players. It could also be fun to take the robot of the grid and have a self sustaining system that could explore the world. Still controlled by the masses, of course.

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