Slashdot Mirror
Robocup 2002 Now Underway
ChenLing writes "Forget small robots on wheels playing soccer...193 teams from 30 countries have built androids to play soccer at 'RoboCup'. Although as the article says, it will be a while before we can pit androids vs humans on the same field....." Our previous story has background links and information about the contest.
... until the robots try to escape!
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Although as the article says, it will be a while before we can pit androids vs humans on the same field
Wouldn't want to get tackled by one of those.
I guess there wouldn't be as much faking on the field then...
Ich werde nie wieder denken
robot hooligans?
Who wants to watch robots play soccer?
Clearly not true. Haven't the writers seen talk-show hosts?
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
The RoboCup people have made it their goal to create a team of robots tht will beat the world cup winner by 2050. Pretty amazing stuff.
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
eulogy-for-the-U.S.-team dept.
:)
Yah, like the US count be germany at this
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Ok, did anybody else read that as 'robocop 2002' and cringe?
I wonder if there is a Zlatko Zahobot or a Keanebot that stomps off the field calling the coach a "Gearhead now and a gearhead when he was a player." Do you give the players punchcards instead of booking them the old fashioned way? What about hooliganbots that trash serverrooms after England gets whipped by the Faroe Islands?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Robots playing football with an exploding ball. What a great game!
Will they get thier own team for World Cup play?
Great Linux Site
Was I the only one that thought this was the latest Ronco invention?
Best Windows Freeware
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.
First they beat us at chess. Then they take our jobs. Now they challenge our authority in football. What next?
I think it is only a matter of time before the machines take over. Strangely enough, I'm not worried. I've seen the cruelty of this world, the irrational hatred and fear that almost defines humanity. I've seen the pain that one human can put another through in the name of love.
There is something colder than the heart of a machine. And that is the heart of a man.
"I'm a rocket man / Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." - Sir Elton John
I don't think the bipeds are competing, just exhibition.
I didn't realize robotics had gotten anywhere near this point. I think a lot of people underestimate exactly how hard it is to get a robot to do something like, for example, find a ball. Now these robots are walking (a significant challenge, from my experience... :) kicking a ball, and interacting with each other? Pretty incredible.
I wonder how sophisticated these humanoids can get. Can they pick themselves up if they stumble? Can they figure out whether another robot is on their team? Can they pass? The article seems to imply that at this point, they're not that much more than glorified mechanical penalty kickers.
Let's get this technology implemented for Doom.
Then again...
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Unlike the british experiment, I doubt we'll find these robots in a parking lot. (*evil grin*)
However, this does raise a question; When these robots get to the point of being able to really _play_ soccer, what happens when they slam into each other? They have to be able to get back up, re-orient themselves, etc. Raises the question of Asimov's three laws....could they decide to actually harm another robot on purpose to impair its playing ability? (Red card on B-001-05-NZ18 !)
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Although as the article says, it will be a while before we can pit androids vs humans on the same field....."
:)
Unless, of course, those androids happen to be buzzsaw wielding, flame throwing, high voltage instruments of death himself (and we mix up the rules a bit)
Let's face it, you'd watch it
Past the road to your house
That you never called home
Where they turned out your lights
Though they say you'll never know
I remember running through the wet grass
And failing a step behind
Both of us never tiring
Desperately wanting
When they pumped out your guts
And filled you full of those pills
You were never quite right
Deserving all the chills
They say the worst is over
Kicked it over and ran
Then they ask what went wrong
When they turn you on again
They turn you on again.
[Chorus:]
Kick them right in the face
Make them wish they weren't born
And if they bring up your name
Well they'll say you won the war.
Baby burst in the world
Never given a chance
Then they ask what went wrong
When you never had it right
Oh the letters have dropped off
Though they say you got them all
I finally figured out some things you'll never know.
Take back your life and let me inside
We'll find the door if you care to anymore.
I remember running through the wet grass
and falling a step behind
Both of us never tiring
Desperately Wanting.
"The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison
Of course it takes that long to clear the dinner table. Look how short they are!
Speaking of football, I have to mention that I'm very surprised that Slashdot didn't have any information about the historic loss of the US football team against Germany.
As far as I understand football is considered to be a "weird" or "nerd" sport in the US, so this would be "News for Nerd. Stuff that matters."
Or are you just rejecting stories which shed a bad light at the US ?
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Or, if the programers were smart, to only commit them when the ref was looking away
if (theirscore - ourscore > 3)
{
robot1.fall_down_and_cry_like_an_argentinian();
while(robot2.check_refs_paying attention() = true)continue;
robot2.break_other_teams_forwards_shin();
}
"Today, however, the simplest act remains a tremendous challenge for any robot."
Well, all they need to create artifical boredrom is a robot with a scoop, and a herring sandwich....
Monday is a horrible way to spend 1/7 of your life.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Is programing at the point where it can truly emulate soccer? Will they shoot the losing goalie? Will the Italian league fire the Korean when he scores against the Italian national team? Most importantly, will they riot?
I hope Robocop goes and beats up those lousy terrorists!
...oh, wait. RoboCUP?
That's just boring, then...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Even though it is very simple soccer, it is still amazing to think that they can have teams actually play against each other. Taking sports or anything that we do everyday and create machines that can do it can have many positive impacts in the future. Who knows maybe they'll find a more efficient way for robots to run, which in return might result into better prostetics for humans. The more interesting aspect is the AI however. I wouldn't mind taking a look at those algorithms. IMHO.
Actually, soccer is the fastest growing sport in the US. Admittedly, that means precisely squat because it has no real following compared to more traditional American sports, but at least it is growing.
Murphy was an optimist.
I'm not a big sports fanatic or anything but shouldnt some things be left to humans. Sure we create these nifty robots that bend to our every command and do as they are programed for. But how lazy does that make us...we're now making robots to play our sports, teachers will eventually be dubbed out for computer interaction (i.e. DDR in Gym class, what will come next? I shudder to think...
I got my ramen noodles, and my torengos and my beer...everything else I dont nessacarily need!
-Alicia
i realize there's a lot of work behind this sort of thing....and that soccer really isn't the point....
...but really...i would whip all of them.
and bash soccer all you want. bash ALL sports. they've all gone too far.
Carnegie Mellon University's hypothetical Robotics Channel covers yet another exciting robot sporting event.
recently i watched a PBS (i think) special on the Robocup...must've been from 2001, if the 2002 one is going on right now...it was hosted by Alan Alda...anyway, it was really interesting...
some of the things the teams could do were amazing...while most teams basically used "brute force" to push the ball into the net, there were some advanced teams that could actually recognize teammates and pass the ball to them...that was pretty impressive...the had kind of a pinball type flipper kinda thing that would poke out near their feet...
another cool thing was that some of the robots (i think it was the same team that could do the advanced passing) could actually "trap" the ball...they had a spinning bar on their front, so as the ball came to them, the bar would spin, and they could keep control of it, by basically continually spinnning the ball towards themselves...kinda like a tread mill...
another progressive idea (and i'm sure the slashdot/open source community will appreciate this) was that after the competition is over, all of the teams are required to share their source code, so everyone starts on the same plane for the next year of research... it's really a cool speical if you can catch it while you're flipping the channels sometime....
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
The motivation behind these human-shaped robots is not at all the same as the motivation of the wheeled robot soccer tournaments. The whole point behind the small robots on wheels is to learn and improve on teamplay and improvisional skills from a software level, not in mimicry of physical ability. These approaches to robot design aren't competitive, they are parallel in the pursuit of higher functionality.
Actually they call it football because you use your FEET which sounds more like a game played with your feet.
1) A game where you kick a ball and use almost nothing but your feet
2) A gamer where you hold a ball and run and try not to get tackled my large sweaty men
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I'd like to see a comparison of this year's robots vs. last year's. What new features are being tried out, how much closer are we to the dream of beating the best humans, and what strategies are being rethought?
Everyone always talks about how fast technology like this advances, but when I watch the little Aibo's fight it out, it always looks the same to me. Can anyone provide insight?
1. A robot may not score on his team's own goal, or, through inaction, allow his team's goal to be scored upon.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by coaches except where such orders would conflict the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own field position as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The next step would be to refine each personality, perhaps trying to emulate a real soccer player, and continue to use the robots to predict the outcome of a game or to find a particular weakness in a player.
It would at least be popular with gamblers. :)
I nominate yesterday's robot! A stadium full of these and I think I'll stay home and watch the game on Pay-per-View.
Forget small robots on wheels playing soccer ...
Please let not forget about those small robots, the design and contest goals are quite different for the small/medium league versus the humanoid league. If I'm not mistaken one of the contests in the humanoid league is standing on 2 feet for an amount of time (ok.. it's the first year for the humanoid league but come on this doesn't look really spectacular), so this league is mostly about designing humanoid robots and writing software for moving them around without falling.
The small and medium size leagues are a lot more about designing distributed systems of autonomous agents and letting them sort out good strategies for play. I think the non humanoid leagues will be much nicer to look at for some years to come and forgetting about them will make a game of robotsoccer even harder to watch (watching one of those games still consists of waiting for a long time looking at robots that decided they better like it standing still.)
We'll just put a robots.txt file in our goal! :-)
Will the Italian league fire the Korean when he scores against the Italian national team?
That would be like the Colorado Avalanche firing Joe Sakic for being on the Canadian Olympic hockey team.
...fighting it out. 'Battle Bots' are just big-ass RC cars with weapons too weak to do any real damage. Also, who wants to mod up a post referencing a show on Comedy Central? Huh..
If these walls could talk they'd probly still ignore me. --MF DOOM
...when they build one that looks like Madonna and has a tongue.
_
I am not a troll. I am a vertically challenged bridge inspector!
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
To be quite honest, the Germans are the ones that looked bad after this game.
Already the press is saying how the US pretty much dominated most of the game, and even ex-German players are criticizing the poor performance of the German team.
Historically, Germany is a "soccer" super-power and has won the World Cup more than one time.
The US is a "novice" when it comes to this sport, and in the last World Cup we finished dead last out of all the countries.
Support for soccer in Germany is great, even the president of that country was photographed watching the game.
So to be quite honest, I'm proud of a 1-0 loss against Germany (let's not talk about the obvious goal & penalty not counted by the referee).
Germans expected to beat the US like they did Saudi Arabia. All they came up with was a "1-0" win. At this rate, the current German team has very little chances of beating Brazil, Spain or even Senegal/Turkey.
- sigs are for wimps.
how are all those overpaid professional athletes going to ever get that kind of salary out of Unemployment? Doesn't anyone realize what this will do to their lifestyles?
I can see it now, the cover of cheerios, robbie the robot, star pitcher for the NY Yankees - robbie's signature move is the 350 mph curveball.
A gamer where you hold a ball and run and try not to get tackled my large sweaty men
Run? Running is done with your feet. Dumbass. The original assertion (football vs. soccer) stands.
Use Gaak, the escaped robot from the UK, to perform soccer tricks the other bots haven't discovered yet?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Why couldnt they teach them something important, like those nice robots from Krikkit...
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
The part of the article I found amusing was the end where they assure us that even if robots one day can beat us at soccer that we should still be proud, because building the robots was a human endeavor.
Almost every article relating to some type of AI has to get those little insecurity-based digs in. It reminds me of all those Star Trek episodes where human beings are held up as the treasures of the universe.
It's very telling and sad, really. We can't just celebrate achievement for its own sake, we have to tie it to our family, our school, our nation, or (at very least) our species.
Unfortunately, I don't think that we'll lose that immaturity any time soon.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
According to Garry Archer, who's played for both English and American Football/Soccer clubs, soccer is an English word merged from "rugby" (or rugger) and association football. Take a look at the full explaination: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~pstone/why.html
Or look it up on the net your damn selves......
"Sexy Man" is not a moderation option. -- arose
Elton John
You are a slack jawed faggot.
Go suck your daddy's cock again, puff boy.
Soccer fans don't go for the sport, they go to express that infinite European desire to proclain their own localities superiority. Barbaric and tasteless diversion for the lowest common denominator.
I want chicken. I want liver. Meow Mix Meow Mix Please Deliver.
A winner is you!
Copycat.
For any of you out there who might be UC Berkeley students there will be a decal offered next semester in which we will build a team to play in the Simulation league. It'll be focused on developing the AI needed to do something like play soccer and should be a lot of fun. Watch the decal page for more info.
what a bunch of. btw, why do geeks use their full names, ie michael instead of mike? johnathan instead of john, etc. etc. etc.
That infinite European desire to punch the crap out of froggies, krauts, dagos, eyeties, polacks, micks, sheepshaggers, scots, and all those Eastern European countries we haven't really got derogatory names for because in a thousand years we've somehow never found a reason to hate them... Yes, that. And that infinite English inability to forget about the war...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Read this then go look in the mirror and realize how much of a fool you just made of yourself.
Just because you post AC doesn't mean you're not a moron.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Didn't Gary Linneker once say something like :'Soccer is a game of eleven against eleven, and in the end, the Germans win'?
superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
you're missing the point, we're not trying to create robots so that worldcup players can take a break, they're building robots that can solve problems, and since it's an international effort they chose a dynamic medium (unlike chess et al.) that has global interest/understanding. making a robo-football (americano) would have about as much interest in the rest of the world as a robo-sumo would here in the states...
and as far as replacing teachers w/ computers, espcially jr. or sr. high teachers: how many students are already having their teachers be replaced by google? honestly there's more information online ready for consumption at your own pace (oft much faster than in a classroom setting) than any teacher could ever supply anyone with. true human interaction, blah blah blah, but face it, for people interested in learning technology will be a panacea.
sorry this is a bit off-topic, but isn't that the way discussions usually go?
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
Will they program female World Cup robots to take off their shirts if they win?
mmm...physics...
I bet Russ^H^H^H^Hsome of the commands considering to buy some of the best performers...
Ok, I'm not there but as far as I know android team v. android team is not being done this year, contrary to what the article is insinuating.
According to the Official 2002 Robocup Humanoid League Draft Rule there are three catagories of Current and Future events with several sub-sections. Here is the run down.
* Standing Still on One Leg
* Humanoid walk - out from one end, around a pylon and back,
* Shoot - where the bot is able to shoot on the goal and get it in.
* Penalty Shootout
* 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 Soccer
* Freestyle - Five minutes of judged performance art.
According to the organizers they are just hoping to get some teams to try the first few! And as you can see the competitive playing of soccer is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaayy down the list and probably aren't even being attempted this 'Cup. Sure, those nice posed shots of those Sony bots look nice, but those aren't competition pictures. Sure, the information on the Official Robocup site is sparse, but don't you think that they would have some big announcement if it did?
This article from MSNBC is confusing one league (the humanoids) with another (the non-humanoid) in an attempt to create hype. Personally I think Robocup deserves it, but not by misconstruing what's going on.
The best thing about the Robocup site is that you can actually watch the replays of the simulation games with Flash. Pretty sweet.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Or do you want to see flamethrowers and tacnukes?
Yes. I will not watch that show until someone in the audience is at least hospitalized. That's when you know they're pushing the envelope.
Better yet, parts of a broken robot blown over (better: through) those wimpy partitions and killing a fan.
I think they have charging penalities. I am not quite sure of the details, but if a robot detects another robot is approaching it, it must make maneuvers to get out of the way (such as move in a different direction). Likewise, if a robot detects it is moving itself toward another robot, it must change course. If two robots are charging each other, and only one attempts to prevent the collision, a foul/penalty is called on the other robot.
All this is in the rulebook, which probably has a stricter definition of how the whole situation works.
Imagine getting kicked in the junk by one of these beasts, or heading-butting them while going for a header. Scary.
it's nice to see these robots taking time from the stress-filled world of building cars to relax a little bit and play some football.
go 10101101
a previous /. article?
What I really want to see is robot hockey!
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Who wants to watch soccer? Why can't the robots play proper football instead?
Oh, I forgot, they haven't got motors strong enough to carry all that wussy 'protection' gear, and robots are too smart to waste waiting 5 minutes between every play.
mogorific carpentry experiments
The coolest thing, by far, to ever be done with the Robocup was to evolve teams to play the game using genetic programming.
/
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/seanl/gp/soccerbots
Don't think this is a high scoring slaughter. They're using binary.
that means precisely squat because it has no real following compared to more traditional American sports
This is a fallacy. There are no american sports.
Everything is either ripped off from some other countries, (such as "Rugby for sissies" - what the americans call "football" - or basketball), or a game (like baseball - it's not a sport, it's a game.)
You know that football is a real sport played by real athletes.
Uhh, no. "American" football is a sissies' version of Rugby. If they were "real" athletes, they'd play without all that stupid-looking equipment.
The Cornell Big Red team is the one that introduced the spinning bar (dribbler), omnidirectional travel, and passing. You have to see these robots in action to appreciate how well this works.
Our current robots can trap the ball and move from one end of the field to the other, backwards in under a second. The ball looks like it is stuck to the robot! On top of just pulling the ball in, they also have a transverse dribbler so that the robot can also move side to side without loosing the ball at the end of the roller.
Most teams are pure CS majors, but Cornell uses a team of Mech. E., EE, and CS students. By doing this, the team can concentrate on developing more innovative robots with new features to better play the game.
Oh, and brute-force is forbidden by the rules. A ref. is supposed to assess penalties against robots that hit into the opposing team's players.
-- Len
I know there was an article about a guy and his family learning to program Java online with a robot programming game. Does anyone remember which website he was talking about? Even better, what's your favorite (preferrably free) robot programming game?
Please refrain from listing a google search, I want to hear what YOU think.
And just what kind of other high-tech protective gear will you have to wear with your robocup 2002? Bionic shinguard X-3? Superconducting supporter J-12? Titanium shoulder pads?
When will the madness end?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
replace this: robot1.fall_down_and_cry_like_an_argentinian(); with robot1.fall_down_and_cry_like_RIVALDO(); now we are talking of MASTER "cry babies"!!!
I'm to assume I'll have to wait years for German robots to stop winning?
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
If we are using bots in our sports, how will that make us better?
It will teach us to make better AI for robots. NO ONE HAS THE INTENTION OF REPLACING HUMAN PLAYERS IN HUMAN SPORTS. This is basically just a research thing. Like a lot of other competitions, they get a bunch of teams together to build a robot to do something. Other competitions have the robots navigate mazes or stack boxes; Robocup has them play soccer. So they chose something that isn't simple labor and requires a bit more thinking and hence more complex and advanced AI. Big deal.
So what does a Robocup look like, exactly? And why do the robots need to wear a cup? Do they have Roboballs?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
For a second I thought they were planning another sequel to this crappy film.
I had just gotten done with a trip to studying kungfu in Dengfeng, China(Site of the Shaolin Temple) when we (20 kungfu students/geeks) happen to see the Cornell University RoboCup team in the Narita Airport. I have to say we were pretty impressed. I asked one of the team members if they gave out cards (yellow/red etc etc) or fouls and he said yes robots can be carded. They had kewl shirts and a very cute manager. Good luck.
skout perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(
... they could replace the ball with a EMP loaded device. It would "shock" the hell out of the players.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
...today's battery technologies.
Would you watch a 90 minutes game only with 60 battery recharge breaks?
I don't think Jerome Bettis needs pads to go up against one of your eurotrash pussy rugby players.
I would like to see one of your pussy eurotrash rugby players "go over the middle" against Ray Lewis (both of them without pads), however. I can always use a goog laugh.
You really need to come up with something better than that. You are embarrassing yourself.
How exactly does that disprove the fact that feet are normally used in running?
Thanks for proving my subject line. The truly stupid (moronic in your case) do throw those words around!
My post wasn't really all that insightful, unless you think the assertion that "snow is cold" insightful. It should be self-evident to anyone who watches sport of any kind.
Here you can find the scores of last years competitions.
As you can see, UNSW totally flattened everyone.
here
here you go, posting anonymously cuz I dont buy into karma. pretty neat videos, CHECK OUT THE GOALIE! ha!
Funny that you chose to reply to this as an AC. Football |= rugby. And I'm not a baseball fan, but it is just as much a sport as football, rugby, soccer, basketball, or whatever. And since basketball was invented on the East Coast of the USA (IIRC), it was obviously not "ripped off from some other countries".
Murphy was an optimist.