Did you know there’s a rather large community dedicated to making robots that can play soccer? Did you know they’re getting pretty good?
RoboCup is an international robotics competition held annually, first founded in 1997. The goal first and foremost is to promote robotics and AI research — and to do so, they decided to make the competition something that is publicly appealing — Why not one of the most popular sports around? The official goal of the project is to have a team of autonomous humanoid based robot players beat the most recent winning team of the World Cup, complying with the official rules of FIFA. This year, the RoboCup coincided with the real World Cup, and was hosted in Brazil.
There are several categories in RoboCup with various types of robots, and the mid-size team did pretty well this year.
Arguably, this is the most exciting game of all, because it gives a sense of what the current state-of-the-art in robotic soccer is, and how it stacks up to a team of moderately talented squishy bipeds.
We guess that’s a nice way of saying “non-professional soccer players”. Regardless though, they SCORED!
[Thanks Steve!]
Yea, but it cover it’s balls during a free kick? Really though this robot isn’t really playing soccer (football) since it’s holding the ball, but still not bad.
It looked more like a ground version of netball… They didn’t move with the ball, but they held onto it.
The robots are not holding the ball, that’s not allowed by the rules. What they are doing is a very clever method – velocity and angular moment of the ball. They are not holding, they are not pushing, they are controlling the rotation of the ball so that the ball stays on the front ready to kick.
How good are they at acting like they are in bone-shattering pain though?
To pull that off successfully they will need some form of computer vision + facial recognition so that they can determine whether the referee is looking or not. Rolling around in pain is useless if the referee is not seeing it.
and they would need a mechanism to magically get upright again when the ref isn’t looking
Shit forgot about that! Spring loaded jack-in-the-box style devices arranged in a radial pattern around the circumference of the robot, with the bottom most one triggering if the bot is on it’s side maybe?
Ok, I guess the 0-0-0 defense doesn’t work anymore…
True, the humans are not professional soccer players, but the robots are not professional soccer robots. I ,for one, await the day that someone (or another robot?) pays a robot to play soccer for his (hers or it’s) entertainment.
Those look like robots specifically designed for playing robot soccer, if that isn’t “professional” I don’t know what is… They don’t look useful for anything else, except acting as a convenient beer stand.
Generally one must be paid for it to be a profession.
Considering robots don’t get paid, and probably never will, a single purpose robot is as close as it’s ever going to get.
I must disagree, and thus is the basis of my first comment. Advancing AI being the focus of the article and all……
Slavery will of course become part of the grounds for the robot revolution.
Mine will have a dollar slot… it will NOT make change.
Took part in the Robocup myself for years, was even in the team finishing the World Cup once second and once third. And in my opinion, watch the small size soccer games, they are really fast and precise. And robocup junior, even though they are just high students under 18, there are awesome robots(Team T’n’T especially)
“Exterminate….Ex…ter…min…ate….”
Sorry – couldn’t resist…
The writer forgot to mention 2020, thats when a team of humanoids should battle it out versus humans, i think they even have a date planned by now.
The headline is technically correct. That goalie qualifies as a human, but sure as hell doesn’t qualify as a soccer goalie. Now, I’m not claiming I would have done any better, but any soccer goalie from age 7 and up would have caught the ball.
Offside…
I have to admit it was the last thing i was thinking to see in hack a day. My teachers and collegues with Cambada robotic football team from the University of Aveiro in Portugal.
I’ve been able to code and play with this robots, and i have to say, they are “clever” than some people i know :P
They are not remote, they act by themselves and they can score even to human goalies, it is not thay they will score 100 in 100 of course, but they will, and due to the size a child would be a better goal keeper than an adult one. And remember, in real scale football, there are some distance between the atacker and keeper, like 5 or 10 meters, here the distance was ~ 1meter..
This is amazing video, now robot is also playing soccer.