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AIBO Robot Dog Soccer Competition
BrianWCarver writes "The Washington Post has an article about teams of college students who program Sony AIBO Robotic Dogs to play soccer against each other in teams of four. While Beckham's job is not yet jeopardized, the cool thing from an AI perspective is that 'once the humans flip the switch, the robots are on their own.' They compete in RoboCup whose stated goal is to 'by the year 2050,
develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots
that can win against the human world soccer champion team.' RoboCup also has competitions with wheeled soccer bots (of varying designs) and have a humanoid league in which the Honda ASIMO appeared. The students in the above article are preparing for the four-legged international championship coming up in July of 2003 in Padua, Italy."
RoboCup 2003
Can you really picture an Aibo bought "in bulk" beating humans at soccer?
Incredibly enough, I used to work for a company that used to make robots (Nomadic Technologies) who is no longer in business, mainly because the owners hated competition.. and it was obvious why.
But back to the point... I have seen some amazing things done with robots and a little LISP programming. Robots working in conjunction with one another to acheive a common goal. And of course, the basic "learning of a laberynth", which is not that basic. This does make me believe that one day, technology will be able to beat humans at team sports.
The reason for my belief is non technical; robots do not have egos and will work better as a team.
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To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and, whatever you hit, call it the target.
As previously reported on Slashdot, Sony has opened up the API for the AIBO, and it can be programmed in C++. My lab has created an application development framework for the AIBO called Tekkotsu that we think people will find helpful. The code is open source and GPLed. Visit Tekkotsu.org for an overview, downloads, demos, and documentation.