The Robot Maze at the KI Festival Heilbronn

Most people have heard a lot about AI. Very few have trained one. In our tent at the KI Festival Heilbronn, visitors did exactly that, with their own body, and then raced the result through a maze.

Train it yourself

A small flower-shaped robot waits at the entrance of the maze. It has no remote control. Each player teaches it before they drive it.

The player stands in front of a phone. The app follows their body and shows it as a skeleton of points. For each command, the player chooses a pose and holds it while the app records a few examples. Then they press train. From now on, the robot responds to their poses.

Then race

The player takes on our own robot, or another visitor at the next phone. The maze is the test. A robot that was trained with care drives well. A robot that was trained in a hurry gets stuck. The fix is simple: go back and record better examples.

What visitors learn

This is how AI training works in real life. Collect examples, train, test, improve. Visitors do all four steps themselves and watch the result drive. Nobody has to explain it to them afterwards.

The game needs no prior knowledge and works for any age. The KI Festival Heilbronn is run by the programming school 42 Heilbronn and drew more than 10,000 people in 2024. It was our third year at the festival in a row.