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Innovation

Portal turret comes alive in robot project

Portal found a way of taking automated gun turrets and turning them into something adorable. That's why we were super excited when we saw that someone had built a working one in real life.
Written by Luke Hopewell, Contributor

Portal found a way of taking automated gun turrets and turning them into something adorable. That's why we were super excited when we saw that someone had built a working one in real life.

A robotics student at Pennsylvania State University in the US has built a turret that talks, tracks movement with a laser-guided system and fires foam bullets at its target.

The turret sees the world via a webcam, controlled via a script written in MATLAB. Most importantly, it sings out all of the adorable phrases we've come to enjoy hearing while we're being shot at in a test chamber.

Now that the technology is working, the student is building a shell to make it look more like the Portal turret.

This isn't the only real-life Portal kit we've seen. Last year, we were delighted to see that Atlassian built its own Portal-style videoconferencing system to connect its offices.

Watch the video to see a naked turret shoot a man in a pink shirt.

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