Colorado Students Clean House With Roomba Pac-Man

If you're young and bright and enjoying the period of life that is time at college, you're absolutely going to have some unstructured time on your hands. What one chooses to do with all of that time, precisely how one decides to fritter it away to pointless, enjoyable ends, could take any number of different paths. For example, there is this stunning display of the latest cutting edge developments in the field of applied beer pong technology.

Alternatively, one might choose to combine the video game of yesteryear with the top housecleaning robot of today, and come up with something special. Behold: Roomba Pac-Man.

This particular nugget of geek fun was recently reported by Engadget. The student engineers responsible for repurposing their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners to play Pac-Man on a larger scale work, study and tinker at University of Colorado's Research and Engineering Center of Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV).

Engadget includes in their article an excerpt from the Roomba Pac-Man Web site that the RECUV project team has set up that suggests the project serves a mixture of high jinx and higher learning alike:

"Built using our spare time, Roomba Pac-Man is designed to showcase the extensive Unmanned Aerial System software suite that we have developed to support our personal research. It was also a great opportunity to use some of our skills for our own entertainment."

Photo courtesy of Susan, via Wikimedia Commons