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AIBO Robot Dog Soccer Competition

Posted by michael on from the bend-it-like-aibo dept.

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."

4 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Solution to Earlier problem. by KrispyKringle · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It's probably relevant that some people believe that in order for an AI to acheive human-like awareness, it will have to perceive and experience the world as humans do. I personally don't subscribe to this; clearly, humans who are disabled or incapacitated and perceive the world from a wheelchair or bed are no less creative or intelligent than those who do not, but it is still an interesting point.

    And even if AI software is not progressing because of wasted time on robots, those robots are still useful. Can you really picture an Aibo bought "in bulk" beating humans at soccer?

  2. long tradition by AbdullahHaydar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    These guys are following a long tradition (in technology years) of soccer-playing robots.

    From this article:

    "This year's challenge was to build soccer-playing robots. An unfortunate choice perhaps, given the possibility of confusion between RoboCon and RoboCup. The latter is another Japanese-inspired initiative, whose goal is also to build soccer-playing robots (Australasian, 30 August 1997). But there are clear differences between the two. RoboCon is based on mechanics, whereas RoboCup is more electrical, being mainly to do with communications and software. Also RoboCup robots are completely autonomous. (RoboCon robots) are remote controlled."

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  3. Ironic by t0ny · · Score: 2, Interesting

    weird how there was a different slashdot article today saying how instead of working on AI people where wasting time making little robots, then lo and behold, here is an article about stupid little robots!!

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  4. A similar competition by meowsqueak · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This competition is similar, although in my opinion has more engineering merit. I spent a year developing a team for the 2002 Korea competition but unfortunately we were beset with a poor budget (NZ$5000 - things got tight) and outrageous shipping delays (6 months for motors) and never completed the team.

    It was interesting because not only did you have to develop the AI to allow the robots to 'play the game', but you also had to develop a computer colour vision system to 'read' the state of play, as well as a suitable control system for the robots themselves. The use of H bridges and avoiding burning out the motors or circuitry when suddenly reversing direction brought in some interesting research from the university's mechanical engineering department. Wireless comms also came into it, with a one-way FM link. A great project bringing many different areas into one 'arena'.

    FIRA has several different classes of competition (we were working towards Mirosot) including a 'simulation only' class.