Indonesian Students Create a High Tech Arcade Claw Machine

You are probably familiar with one of the famous arcade game type, claw machine, a game where the player move a crane using available control to get dolls or provided prizes. Now there is a modern version of the game, Claw Machine With Intel RealSense.

Different from common claw machine, with Claw Machine With Intel RealSense user can move the crane using their hand gestures. Player only need to wave their hand like in left or right direction and the crane will follow the same direction.

The flow of this game is simple from technical side:

1. Player’s hand gestures are capture by Intel RealSense camera to be processed by an application into serial data.
2. The serial data is the submitted to Intel Galileo and then processed to be use by the motor control.
3. The motor control then move the crane in the machine following the user hand gesture.

This Claw Machine With Intel RealSense was made by a group of students and lecturer from Jogjakarta, Indonesia they are Ariska Hidayat from STT Adisutjipto in charge of RealSense app creation; Sukindar Koti Kazturi and Sulis Priyanto fromUIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta in charge of mechanic and electric part; Aulia Faqih from UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta as the team mentor who is also an Intel Black Belt Software Developer.

The team building the Claw Machine With Intel RealSense

The team create this device to show an innovative way in utilizing Intel RealSense technology. If usually developers use Intel RealSense for common video game, they want to show this technology can be integrated into arcade machine or hardware based game.

In creating Claw Machine With Intel RealSense, the team use several Intel technologies at once, they are:

• Intel NUC, it functions as processing data Intel RealSense camera into serial data.
• Intel RealSense, it functions as the camera that capture player’s hand gestures.
• Intel Galileo, it functions as a microcontroller that process serial data for motor control.

Intel Galileo inside Claw Machine With Intel RealSense

The creation of this arcade machine took about 3 weeks. 1 week for mechanic development stage, 1 week for electric development stage, and 1 week for Intel RealSense software development stage and troubleshooting.

At first, the team encounter some problems in creating the machine. First, it’s not easy to find the necessary components for the mechanic engine so they need to be creative in component usage. To create the crane mover component, they even use printer roller that has been customized.

Other than that, they also found problem in founding the correct electrical voltage to send to the crane and many need to be troubleshooted when they integrate the software, electric, and the mechanic component into the machine. The hardest challenge is they had a broken electric component that makes them to find the replacement fast in order for not to be late of the deadline.

Their hard work was paid when their Intel RealSense based claw machine works well and can be played by people without problem. Many people flock and intersted with the device when it’s demoed in Intel Innovation Day 2015 in Indonesia some times ago.

* This article was created in collaboration with Intel Developer Zone.