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."

Comments

Wow... ambitious

[jat850]

This is a very ambitious goal for the RoboCup team ... it will require great strides in so many areas: things like image recognition, mechanical and electrical engineering, and a severe amount of artificial intelligence breakthroughs. Soccer is not just a game that can be "solved" like checkers, tic-tac-toe, and awari are, and chess will be. It requires a much higher level of artificial intelligence (decision making, goal-based planning, etc.)

It would be very neat to see something like this happen, and I know 47 years is a long time, but it's still an incredibly ambitious goal :)

Interesting quote

[kiwimate]

[The team]...changed the "confidence level" before shooting. Instead of looking for a perfect opportunity, the dogs would shoot faster and more often. It worked.

So what they've done is end up with looser play and lower hit rates as opposed to higher accuracy. That's fine for winning a soccer tournament (and please understand -- I'm by no means discounting the incredible coolness of what's going on here), but how would this translate in the real world?

Here's something even more cool to think about...just imagine if you could program the dogs to adapt their style of play over the course of the tournament (learning) and then observe if they "naturally" tended to this style of play in any case.

um, not cheating = "cool"?

[SuperBanana]

the cool thing from an AI perspective is that 'once the humans flip the switch, the robots are on their own.'

How else do you hold an "AI robot" contest? Humans mucking about with the things is called cheating. If they get disabled or whatnot, of COURSE they should be left alone.

I hate robot/AI contests which are dumbed down- watch a robot 'soccer' match, and often you'll see volunteers putting robots back on the right course when they've boxed themselves into a corner and such...like the programmers/designers shouldn't have to be 'troubled' by such things as getting trapped by two walls, or all the contestants have such miserably designed/programmed robots that they fail left and right.. Everyone wants to work on the "chase the ball" routine, but nobody wants to work on the un-sexy, nuts-and-bolts, "keep from smacking the wall and staying there" routine.

In the real world, there are no magical hands that pick you up and flip you around and set you going with a pat on the CPU...and what every robotics person calls "simplifying the problem", I call "cheating". This constant cheating has led to a field which is incapable, still, of dealing with the simplest problems but can solve these wonderful complex ones. The result is a lot of electromechanical garbage that's simply unuseable in anything even remotely resembling the real world.

I was there

[daves]

My son and I went out for the day on Sunday to see what was up. The Aibos were a hoot to watch, but nothing to write home about in terms of playing soccer. They had trouble keeping track of themselves and the ball at the same time.

According to the lead researcher (the lady in the left in the picture), the dogs communicate with each other on their position and the location of the ball. You could see some cooperation in their actions, but not much. They would sometimes spend some time deciding who would go for the ball, but I never saw anything like a coordinated pass on a breakaway.

They don't yet track the opposing players, and got too easily hung up on obstructions, like the corner of the goal. A dribbling player would stop every couple of steps, look around to check the location of the corner posts, and lose the ball.

In terms of soccer play, the smaller, wheeled league was much more impressive. The single camera gave the team a comprehensive view of the field, ball, and opposing players. Every robot had an arrangement of colored dots on top to identify the player and it's position. The players were fast (probably a 1-2 second dash from one end of the field to the other), and were effective at dribbling (with a spinning bar that spun the golf ball toward the robot) and shooting (with a kick bar).

There was not a lot of depth to the competition. The 3rd-4th place consolation game consisted of a whole lot of nothing going on. Hopefully, more schools will get involved for future research.