Autonomous Paintball Sentry Gun

What is the best thing about making a computer program that targets and kills anything that enters its sight? Why giving it a weapon, of course! No, we are not talking for real, but the next best thing, an Autonomous Paintball Sentry Gun.

The autonomous part of the device comes from a pc on the sideline and is fed input though a standard webcam. The feed is ran though a processing script where, once accustomed to the background has the option to fire at anything it sees moving, or a nice point n click manual mode.

The Arduino part is in a the role of driving the servo motors for X/Y movement and a trigger and is powered by a fist full of D cell batteries to give plenty of time for fun. Also, be sure to check out our other sentry guns, one using Microchip PIC, and another sporting a super compact computer running Ubuntu

23 thoughts on “Autonomous Paintball Sentry Gun

  1. wow Barefoot, you have been here for a while!
    Thank you for pointing that out because this article only links to those posts and you didnt comment on them..

    I myself love when they show different ways of doing something

  2. I really wish someone sould make these with real servos instead of the toys from a hobby shop. you should be able to target and aim in less than 1/50th of a second.

    Please someone that has access to real servos and a CNC shop make a nice real sentry… please!

  3. Seems like a rechargeable motorcycle battery would be a better power source than a bunch of D-cells. Unless of course it’s meant to be a static system — I don’t see many people dragging their laptops out to the paintball field. In that case just use an AC adapter.

    That one a while back that had the laptop, turret, and power supply all mounted in a briefcase that you could just drop, open and set up in seconds — that was way cooler IMO.

  4. @kdkk it looks like it could be converted to use a real gun in a few minutes — it’s just a servo pulling a trigger. Put a semiautomatic rifle in there instead and you’ve got an extremely dangerous, deadly and illegal device.

  5. What image processing algorithm(s) did you use? How hard was it to learn? I’m a computer engineer myself so the hardware part of this is pretty neat but I’d like to get into image processing.

  6. I’d like to see one of these made into an anti-vandalism/tagger gun. Add some sensors to activate the system when it smells aerosol paint, target the tagger and paint them.

  7. @loulinkj7 If he wrote his own algorithms I’m completely amazed — I’ll bet it’s just an implementation of the well-established stuff in OpenCV. Look into that if you want to get started…there are versions of it for everything from C to ActionScript and it does most of the image processing automatically.

  8. @brad: My thoughts exactly.

    I love these projects, it makes me want to setup a bunch of 22mm semi automatic rifles or the like. Thats some nice Anti-Zombie technology right there, add some solar panels for self recharging and Wifi with a Cantenna. Oh yeah I’m feeling safer just thinking about it.

  9. I agree that the one on thesentryproject is good compared to all the others but.. The kit cost $550. The kit includes about $15 iron pipe and $20 in cheap servos and free open source software. In the 5 minute video there was only about 4 or 5 strikes on the target at a distance of more than 30 feet and those 4 or 5 strikes were after emptying a 100 round hopper about 5 times. Less than %1 accuracy. The white goomba face stayed white almost the whole video.

    It would be nice to see somebody with CNC building experience do a project like this. If there’s one thing machinists know it’s rigidity. That mixed with a little Speed-Direction predicting algorithm would be king.

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