Official Rules

[http://www.airhockeyworld.com/usaarules.asp](US Air Hockey Association (USAA) official tournament rules)

One of the more interesting rules is that once the puck enters your half of the field, the puck can only remain in your area for up to 7 seconds, during which you are allowed to maneuver and interact with the puck as many times as you want.

Regulation board size: 90"x50"

AI Game logic

Offense

Defense

Defense is much more difficult than offense because the puck can travel up to ~800 in/sec. This means that the puck will have moved half the board distance in 0.06 seconds. With a camera capturing at 60FPS and taking 2 frames to deduce the vector of motion of the puck (2/60sec = 0.03sec), we only have 0.03 seconds to move the mallet into final position.

Floating triangle theory: http://billystubbs.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/floating-triangle/ Even before acquiring a vector of the puck, there are zones you can move to in order to anticipate and best react to the puck. So in the diagrams, the white circle is the puck, and the dark circles are the respective defending positions for each possible category of angles of attack. So we can move the puck to the center of a given cluster prior to getting a vector and then adjusted as more information becomes available.