NAO Playing Battleship
Humanoid playing battleship against human opponent
About Battleship
Battleship is a classical guessing game played between two opponents [1]. Each player has a fleet that includes several ships of different sizes. These ships are to be positioned on a Battleship board. The Battleship board is a grid of square cells with equal rows and columns. The position of each ship is selected by each player without any restrictions except in the case of overlapping ships, which is forbidden. After the positioning is finished, the game may begin, and the position of the ships cannot be changed. The goal of this game is to sink every enemy ship before the opponent sinks your fleet.
In each turn, a player is on the defensive and the other on the attacking end. The one who is attacking has to guess where the opponent has positioned its fleet, choose a board coordinate that the player wishes to hit, announce the coordinate and wait for the other player’s response. On the other hand, the defending player has to check if the selected coordinate of the attacker has successfully hit a ship of his fleet and then announce the results truthfully to the opponent. For the next turn, the roles change between the players, and the attacker becomes the defendant and vice versa. This swap of roles continues until one of the two players is left without any non-sunken ship. A ship is sunken if every cell it occupies has been hit. Furthermore, when a ship receives the final hit, its owner has to announce to the opponent that it has been sunken along with the type of this specific ship.
Gameplay
The goal of this project is to make NAO [2] play battleship against a human opponent. For this project, we used are 5x5 size board and each fleet constructed from 2 Destroyer ships of 3 cell size and 2 Submarine ships of 2 cell size. For NAO to play this guessing game, we devised a vision, control, voice, and cognition system. The vision system helps NAO realize and locate the game board, the control system enables NAO to place its ships on board using its arms, the voice system lets NAO interact with the human opponent, and the cognition allows NAO to reason and play the game.
Team
Sumit Patidar, Konstantinos Theodorou
References
[1] NAO humanoid. IEEE. Available at: https://robots.ieee.org/robots/nao/ (Accessed: 5 October 2022)
[2] Battleship. Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(game) (Accessed: 5 October 2022)