Vegas card dealers make it look easy, but sliding a uniform number of cards to a set number of players turns out to be a tough robotics challenge. As a robotics teacher in Australia, Damien Kee had seen a lot of automated card dealers that were too slow or were unable to reliably control whether cards landed face-up or -down. Using parts from LEGO programmable robotics kits, Kee wrote software that instructs connected components to deal two cards to four locations. The dealer rotates quickly between player positions using a LEGO turntable placed inside a stabilizing base. Kee tackled the trickier card-flip problem by mounting two spinning wheels beneath a deck of heavy, wide casino cards.
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