Slashdot Mirror
Robocup 2002 World Robot Soccer Championships
dipfan writes "While the rest of the world is watching the soccer world championships in Korea and Japan this summer, at the same time the Robocup 2002 competition for soccer-playing robots is to take place there - the sixth time the tournament has been held, with 35 countries competing and this time including a "humanoid league" competition. The purpose is to foster research in robotics, with the aim of building a team of robots that can play and win against the best human teams by 2050. One of the pre-tournament favourites this year is Iran, who did well in 2000 but not in 2001. The Swedish team includes a star player named Priscilla, described as "looking like a sister of the Terminator". One of the Swedish designers comments: 'you don't want to give too much freedom to the robots as they will go crazy.' Much like flesh-and-blood highly-paid sports stars really."
Finally, a robot with balls.
Oh, great, crazy robots and soccer. Like there isn't enough soccer violence already. Next we'll have robot soccer players wigging out and pulling spectators out of the stands.
I am dreading to imagine what the father looks like if he finds out I was messing around with her...
Dodge this !! --Trinity, The Matrix
While i was talking to this phillips guy, who worked on this project in his spare time, some weeks ago he gave a demonstration (showing some video) this was my first contact with this sport, but it looked very cool...although there not one of the favourites (yet) i think its nice to c what kinda work is being done.
And above what parts of this research can be used for other parts of lets say the medical industry etc.
Keep up the good work guys
In related news today, the Brazilian contender for this year's Robot Soccer Cup was disqualified after testing positive for overclocking.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
When I first read this, I could've sworn it read Robocop. I can only say I'm disappointed -- players being riddled with bullets from Robo's automatic pistal or impaled on that data spike would make things pretty interesting.
I dream of a day where we have robots to play soccer for us thus freeing up humans for more valuable endeavours like building pyramids out of Coke cans.
If you're going to build a robot, make it useful! (Hey! Bring me a beer!)
I saw this on the local (Orlando) news last night. A guy at UF built a beer opening robot (ABOR) as part of a project/competition. Some amusing ideas. Here's a link to a story about it: Robots
Planetes
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
So if they throw rolls of toilet paper onto the field at regular matches, what'll they throw when the robots are playing? Rolls of duct tape?
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
ummm, isn't this site hosted in America? If you say "football" in America, it means something entirely different. And yet it seems a majority of the rest of the world that reads and understands english, would know that soccer==football for them, right? So... the editors could use one word which everyone would understand, but would kinda piss off a minority of their readership (I would think english-speaking non-U.S. folks are a minority here), or another word which would be misunderstand by most of their readership.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
"combat seems to be the only way that men express themselves or advance their knowledge."
For someone with a PhD, that is a remarkably narrow-minded and sweeping generalisation. Perhaps you should ask a few men whether they consider fighting to be their only method of information discovery.
Simon. PhD. In image processing.
Physicists get Hadrons!
My university, Carnegie Mellon, competes in this competition. We usually do very well, I think second last year or the year before. But if anyone would like to see a video of the action, here's one here. Very cool stuff.
Here are some pictures of Priscilla. That robot is scary looking. I wouldn't want to meet it (her?) on a soccer field or anywhere else.
Robots should be cute. Otherwise they remind us of the whole taking-over-the-world scenario.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Two to three years ago, a team mounted a spinning blade in front of the robot. The ball bounced like a bullet whenver got in touch with the spinning blade. It upset many people. Not only because that is of little skill, but also may damage other people's robot... At the end, the design was banded for further matches.
True story from a lecturer that I know, who is a veteran robocup participant.
I visited this thing back in '99 when it was held in Stockholm.
;-)
Cool stuff! (I liked the Sony Aibo compo, especially.. they're so cute.. )
Definetly more interesting than robotwars,
but a little more violence wouldn't hurt.
(Nasty tackles, anyone? )
Go Team Sweden!
(Note: I'm sitting in a RoboCup lab right now, so IMNSHO:)
:) There are a lot of strong teams in the league though so we'll have to see...
:) It sure did that for me, even though I've been programming them for several years.
I don't think the favorite is going to be Iran this year, but more likely the Phillips professional team, which won the German Open this year. That said, I wish people would realize there are 4 leagues, not just the middle size league, with different robots and different favorites in each. In the Sony Legged league, UNSW has dominated, though we came in second
In the small size, I'd say the favorites are last year's winner LuckyStar II from Singapore, and Big Red from Cornell University. FU-Fighters is also a pretty strong team. Our team (CMU) hopes to do a lot better this year in the small size league. We won in '97 and '98, but haven't done too well since then.
I don't know to much about the simulation league so I won't bother to comment. Finally, a personal plug: See a video from the vision system of a Sony legged robot here. It'll give you more respect for how hard a problem this is
...I do my AI Masters Thesis for that guy (Peter) and some friends of mine have been working on Priscilla. He has an enormous talent for getting publicity on everything he does. The smaller robot, Elvis, has been on national TV and on posters on public transportation here in Gothenburg, among other things. Everytime he starts on a new project, he manages to make the press interested and write an article about it. Perhaps more scientists should look into PR?
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
How does one compete in this tournament? It looks like all the teams have identical equipment: do the companies (like Sony) sponsor them?
Because it's an enormously difficult task to do (as a robot) what you and I take for granted.
Motion (walking, for example) involves all sorts of attitude shifts to maintain the centre of gravity in the correct place - it's not just putting one foot in front of the other. If you look at how athletes use their bodies to kill momentum and do quick turns, I think you'll agree that the slow-plodding robots are a long way off yet...
Machine vision is still in its' infancy. What you have is unsurpassed. What a 95% blind man has is unsurpassed by machines. Vision implies cognition, (without it, it's just a TV screen!) and this is Hard (capital H). Being able to recover depth, handle occlusion and parallax, make inferences from absolute and relative properties (size, circularity, colour, etc.), and generally 'see' is simply not possible yet in the general case.
Temporal tracking is needed to tie each of those frames together, and make further inferences and aid cognition. The ball moves, after all... kicking it is actually solving a pretty complex tensor of vectors that are constantly changing...
Prediction is necessary to make best use of the current tactical position, with allowances for what might happen next. If your defence has just got the ball, the forward might want to make a run towards the opponents goal... This sort of thing is 'common sense' to people, but really hard to get a computer to come up with. It's easy to hard-code some rules into the machine, but the real goal (pun intended!) is to get the machine to devise its' tactics from instant to instant.
In short, although it's "just a game", it embodies a large cross-section of really hard problems in robotics. Frankly, my money's on the humans!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Improvements are continually being made but, as Professor Nordin warned, "you don't want to give too much freedom to the robots as they will go crazy.
"You want the robots to have the ability to learn some of the things, but not do completely unexpected things."
Finally, it seems like someone has watched enough sci fi flicks to get the idea that autonomous machines are scary.
I read about advances in AI theory and think "Sheesh, haven't these guys ever heard of Skynet? HAL? Maximilian?" I read about artificial wombs and wonder if Aldous Huxley was ever required reading...
Even the Simpsons had it right:
"Itchy and Scratchy Land: the amusement park of the future where nothing can possi-blye go wrong. Er, possi_bly_ go wrong. Heh, that's the first thing that's ever gone wrong."
Frink - "You've got to listen to me. Elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok in an orgy of blood and kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving."
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
I'm on the University of Virginia team, and we're one of two teams to qualify representing the US for the simulation league (which doesn't use real robots, and is thus a lot more fast paced). The other team being AT&T Research Labs.
We're actually in the process of looking for sponsors so that we can get to go to Japan for the competition.....
Somehow, seeing Priscilla rip off her jersey at the end of a match just won't be the same as seeing Brandi Chastain do it.
On the other hand, Priscilla could play the part of "Ally McBeal" if they ever revive that series...
Big mistake.
The book is free. It is entirely available on the Internet, and no other place.
The book merely shows that I think deeply about the subject of adversarial behavior. That's the reason I mentioned it.
You should have a look at the Aibo (four legged) leage.
They're extremely cute and I was surprised how well
they play.
The next season will have new rules. The game will be
played four on four (how fitting) instead of three on three,
the playing field will be enlarged, and the next generation
players are allowed to use wireless communication.
I want an open source soccer league, so when someone scores the announcer screams
GPLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!
"So if I understand correctly, the logic involved to win a game isn't really the problem, it is more
of a mechanical problem, isn't it?"
Mechanical? Oh, there's far more to it than that. Designing good algorithms for vision and planning is not a trivial task, even if it does get easier with increased memory availability. How do you tell where the ball is, and discern the ball from a similarly colored spherical object on the sidelines? How do you identify your teammates? What motions should you use to respond to the ball headed towards you? A chess player is far easier to implement - the problem space is small and well-delineated (you have X many possible moves, with Y many possible responses, etc.)
I'm on the University of Virginia team, and we're in the simulation league. We don't have physical robots. The result is we don't have to spend the effort on mechanical concerns and image recognition, and we get to devote more effort to the AI aspect of the competition. In the simulation league, the robots DO get tired, they do miss shots, and they have imperfect information. The idea is to remove all physical considerations from play and have them win on intellect alone. The robots being used in competition are no where near the level required to beat a world cup team, but I imagine that once they get close, these "humanizing" factors will be added to keep the match fair. At the current rate of development, I expect this to be well before 2050.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Video games are heavily hampered by their interface. Just because the simulation has the skill to beat you when you're using your thumbs doesn't mean it can beat you on a 3-D field.
Anyway, it's easy to make an incredibly good video game team. All you have to do is have the players controlled by an omniscient observer with perfect information. No human could match that. When you make the players autonomous, with imperfect information, a limited field and range of view, and limit their communication with one another to the equivalent data bandwidth of soccer players yelling at each other during play and pointing with their arms (this is implemented in the soccer server) the challenge becomes much greater. Getting independent agents to function as a team when they have different information is not at all trivial.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your