OpenSauce 2025

What's Planned This Year?

We exhibited our Tiny Bots project last year at OpenSauce 2024. For more info on the technical details, please check them out here. We were thrilled with the awesome reception we got for our project and got a few cool ideas for improvements:

• The soccer mode is fun, but the walking was a bit slow and the robots tended to fall over regularly (though they could stand back up!)
• The fighting mode worked great but could be improved with more intuitive controls (and a faster walk speed, like with soccer).
• The dance mode was the clear favorite but the motions were limited to the arms, head, and a tiny bit of torso movement so the bots wouldn't fall over.

One of the recurring suggestions we got was to blend our realtime motion capture dance system with robot fighting - "Real Steel" style. Turns out it is not that hard to split a webcam image and run two instances of our motion-capture system, so can have more than one player control the bots at once!

This year we're refining the robots' movements to incorporate data from the built-in IMU for more stable and fast walking for the previously implemented game modes. In addition we're creating a new "blended" game mode with motion-tracked fighting. We're also improving the score tracking system to be more accurate and engaging for both players and spectators.

Thank you for considering our application!