This goal of this project was to build a robot that could recognize solo cups by their shape and color, determine its angle and distance, then fire a ping pong ball to land in the cup from 8 feet away. As this was a student project we had very little funding so I made pretty much everything from scratch in the machine shop (including the coil gun and encoders).

The high level controls for the bot were implemented in MATLAB for target recognition and range calculation etc. The low level control loops were implemented in a PIC microcontroller with some external analog circuitry. I made a video that goes describes each piece of the robot and shows the bot in action (complete with awesome music):