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Robot soccer - AIBO Blown Away
Chilli writes "The results of RoboCup 2000 (the 4th RoboCup world championships) are out. There was a big suprise in the four legged robot league, which consistently uses AIBO hardware. UNSW United blew the competition away. In the final, they won 10-0 against last year's champion. The success was largely due to a new walking technique developed by the UNSW team."
Why would anyone in the States be interested in a football match anyway.
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Every other country in the World plays football, yet all the Americans play soccer.
American football is nothing more than a girls rugby, has it's own World league, in which no other countries participate.
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Um, no. The battle bots are remote controlled by people (and are pretty boring, but that's just IMHO), the soccer robots are run by AI.
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We apologise for the inconvenience.
Yes, these football robots are all good and fine, but what I want to see are some ice hockey robots able to duke it out like the goons they should be. Besides, a robot able to skate would be quite a challenge to engineer, methinks...
After all, during a cold, wet, wind-swept 3rd Division game on a Tuesday evening in December I've only had the humbe pie to keep me warm.
The gimmick for the winning aibo robot was actually software, the link is at the top of the page (!). They had a better walking algorithm, however there are many more leagues in robocup than just the aibo league. The aibo hardware is very limited in it's ability to cominicate between robots and also in it's sensors. So the really interesting intelligent autonomous robots won't be found in the aibo's. Although it is commendable that the aibo uses a fixed platform so hardware gimmicks aren't an issue. My comment refered to robocup as a whole especially the middle sized league (and the bi-pedel league once it develops ).
Sibling rivalry at its worst!
I'm from Canada and just HAPPENED to be backpacking in Melbourne, Australia when I heard Robocup 2000 was on. Being a dedicated geek I decided to show up on the last day and see it for myself. I must say I was a little disapponted. It was cool an all, but I was there on the LAST day, which should have all the best stuff and the snazziest teams, but there wasn't a whole helluva lot to see and do. A comment on the robosoccer players: It was blatantly obvious (and probably is to a lot of you already, but I'll say it anyway) that the larger/more complex the robotics involved the shittier the soccer you watched. The best were the pure AI players displayed on a big-assed screen for all to see. No robotics at all. The winning team was FC Portugal and they did a fine job of getting their players to always go after the ball/opposing players in two, which in my opinion cinched their victory. The worst were the humanoid biped walkers. It was sort of neat to watch (the one I actually saw walk), but the thing was painfully slow, and watching the little 2' robotic imp turn was excruciating. It just sort of rocked back and forth for half a minute until it had changed direction. In it's favour it did manage to kick a ball into a goal, but they aren't anywhere NEAR being able to play soccer. They were more of a techo demo. Aside from that they had the small wheeled robots, the larger wheeled robots (sorta Dalek looking), and the Aibos. I didn't realize you could program EVERYTHING on there, including their now famous kneeling crab-walk gait that really did help. Even without their new walk their strategy was better. I couldn't tell you what it was, but it was aetherally THERE and helping them out. It was hilarious to watch the other (standard gait) continuously get bowled over by the crab-gait team. At one point I think ALL of the opposing team's Aibos were on their backs flailing their legs in the air trying to right themselves! WEll that's it that's all. $20 entry fee. Ciao bella. -=Cam ===== cam_marsollier@hotmail.com
You aren't going to get anywhere with "high level strategy". That's why no one has anything to show for 50 years of AI research.
Who cares if you find the optimal strategy for playing soccer within certain constraints? Programming a computer to play a perfect game of tic-tac-toe doesn't get you any closer to building something that's actually intelligent.
Robots aren't near human level computing power, so anything that looks like "strategy" is "pre-computed formula". On the other hand, Rodney Brooks' robots are in the same league as bugs, and they do bug like things in ways that may be close to how bugs do them.
So let the state of the art advance based on hardware for a while. Eventually, though, everyone will be running very similar hardware, and the better software will win out. Everyone is probably already running a good overall strategy -- it's the local control abilities that no one knows how to do well.
Blockquoth the poster:
Personally, I think it's pretty arrogant to assume that you (or anyone) knows "the wisdom and will of our Lord". Life has changed in the past 2000 years and yet very few updates have come down from Heaven as to how to live. Even if you believe that the New Testament is the revealed Word, you should be able to see that God always chose to speak in the metaphors and memes comprehensible at the time. If He'd mentioned "transferring consciousness to a computer", it would've sounded like gibberish. Actually, it'd sound a lot like assumption into Heaven... Hmmm.If you accept evolution, then humans using their brains (even for -- gasp! -- technology) is simply part of natural selection. If you're an evolutionary deist, then humans using their brains is a culmination of God's design. If you're a creationist, then it's silly to oppose technological innovation: You're alleging that God put a massive, wonderful, functioning brain in (nearly) every human, for the sole purpose of us ignoring it?? That's horribly inelegant.
I am amused and saddened by how many people believe that God is limited by their imaginations.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
It warms my heart to see that even the nutty transhumanists who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality don't take themselves seriously enough to login or even create a dummy account. Let me save this futurist bullshit on the mini-tapepunch machine in my flying car or I'll just have the robot butler/babysitter/security-guard do it for me.
Hit pause on your Star Trek marathon tape and try to join us in the real world, ok Spock? I like sci-fi too, but extrapolating one idea or two to their irrational end to produce some lame Star Trek-esque fantasy is simply not convincing. memepool recently posted a similiar rant.
Funniest thing I've seen on slashdot in ages.
Are they robotic too?
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
It would be cool if you gave them guns like that other security robot a while back. Then they could act like Rap stars.
Sig it.
Um, is that really correct? My reading (and the pictures shown) seem to indicate that the winning team, like all (?) other, used AIBO hardware--it's the software that differs between the teams...
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
or better yet can they pick up pop stars??
mv
After all, the future of the human race may depend on robotic systems. No, I'm not joking, I'm talking about Von Neumann machines, which will one day be our route to colonising the entire Universe without any of the troubles caused by transporting meat sacks throughout the cosmos.
Indeed, by the time we get to that stage we may be able to avoid the messiness of organic life altogether, and have transplanted our conscioussness into some form of computer technology. Finally, we would be free of the things that hold us back - mortality, hatred, love and fear. Rather than spending all of our time fighting amongst ourselves in petty dominance contests we can acheive our manifest destiny amongt the stars.
This is why the US needs to push foward with research into this area, rather than more "glamorous" areas like nantechnology. We need to get our machines launched before anyone else in order to get to their destinations first. In the game of survival, first come is definitely first served.
How do you pronounce that in binary?
Here is their page, if anyone is interested.
Or did you perhaps "access and browse" their site without checking their terms of use?
Oh no! Now Sony will firewall *slashdot* in my computer!
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Rich
The current problem with robocup is that you can win quite easily by devoloping some new "gimmick" like a new walking technique. Iran for instance in the middle sized league has a robot that can turn it's wheels so that it drives in a cirkel around the ball until it's pointing in the right direction and drives of with the ball( turning its wheels into the traight position again ). :) ) with almost no budget to speak of. They beat the combined effort of something like 5 italian universities because the italians where using mostly standerd robots. So until a "standard" robot has emerged that has all the good gimmicks we will not sea a real competion between the (robot)intelligience of the differant teams.
Most universities however are more interested in letting real robot's do higher level strategy and therefor use standard robots. You can write much more interesting reasearch papers about strategy and communications between autonomous robots, than you can about a set of turning wheels. Therefor the iranian team was last years world champion and this years european champion (it was an open championship