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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
At least the humanoid robots currently planned should be better looking in sports bras after a soccer game than some of the women currently playing professional soccer... *Shudder*.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
In this earlier story we are told that AI is going no where due to the fact that graduate students are spending 3 years fixing broken robots instead of programming them.
I think if they give up those big robots, buy some Aibos in bulk, they can skip the repair stage, or at least shorten it quite a bit. Of course, if they get them at Circuit City, they can get the extended guarantee and not have to worry about repairs at all!!!
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Never call a man a fool; borrow from him.
R2D2 can now be a proud soccer mom
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
AI really has gone to the dogs.
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
When a humanoid soccer-playing machine can be developed such that a simple slide tackle (a legal maneuver) can snap limbs, the world cup is a sure bet. This will take far less than 47 years. In fact, drop the "humanoid" requirement and we could be there next year.
Sometimes there's an elegant beauty in simple brute force.
Will the robots be primadonnas who crack during penalty kicks in extra time? Will they be programmed to roll around on the ground in a dramatic display of bad acting?
UNIX/Linux Consulting
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
the blood has stopped pumping, and he's left to decay
the me that you know is now made up of wires
7. This will get the attention of some geeks; maybe enough to draw attention away from "Star Trek" and cause this dead franchise to finally go away.
6. The moment when the goaltender says "Danger, Will Robinson!" is priceless.
5. Lots of fun game play alterations when robot bones are tossed onto the field.
4. Only a matter of time before they allow Taz-Bot, Die-Sector, Vlad, and the rest of our Battlebots friends onto the field. Then the fun really starts.
3. Gets rid of the problem of urination on the field that is plagues any event with real soccer players or real dogs.
2. Americans love dogs. Americans hate soccer. So, this is likely to move soccer from #74 to #63 on the ESPN-2 ratings.
1. Two words: Mecha-Aibo
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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."
Suicide Booth: You are now dead! Thank you for using Stop and Drop, America's favorite since 2008.
[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.
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.
Please help metamoderate.
Only a real geek would take the time to automate an athletic event.
1. Create robotic soccer dogs
2. Replace human athletes
3. ?
4. Profit!
10. Drooldroids
9. Dyna-Mutts
8. Cyberpups
7. WinterMalaMutes
6. FIDO-Net
5. 3L33T T3RR313R's
4. The B-9 K-9's
3. See-Threepoodle's
2. The Borgzoi
1. BITches
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Yeah, true. But that won't make them Brazilian.
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!!
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
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.
After reading the headline, I thought this article was about people playing soccer with the AIBO robot dogs - in my opinion, a far more fun sport than robot dogs playing soccer with soccer balls.
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.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
The couple of robot battle shows Comedy Central and Discovery ran a while back were boring because the robots weren't autonomous. Any hardware monkey can make a remote controlled killing machine. Autonomous ones would be way more interesting! And if they just happened to go mad and start killing the audience, well that just makes it more interesting, doesn't it?
I think I must be channeling Professor Farnsworth...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I used to compete in RoboCup (for 3 years with Cornell) in the Small Size league. I believe the writer of this post is referring to small size (f-180) bots when he uses the term "wheeled soccer robots." I'd like to point out that very few small size robots use two wheels to move around any more. Most use omni-directional drive which consists of a number of spinning balls on the bottom of the robot which allow them to move in any direction at any time. This is very little to do with this post and might be seen as a rant, but since I was on the Cornell team when we brought this different design to competition first I feel a little dedicated to point out that wheeled robots are old school, omni designs now rule the playing field. :)
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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.
> What if those soccer robots develope their own conscience, start killing the humans
I think you mean "consciousness". If they develop a "conscience" then they'll behave OK.
> and send a robot back to the past to kill the leader of the human resistance?
No problem: we'll just appoint the guy who invented them to be the leader of the human resistance.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade