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Kiro, the Foosball Robot
JasonFleischer writes "Although the official line from the RoboCup competition is that robots should be ready to challenge humans on the soccer
field by the year 2050, we don't have to wait that long to see man-machine
competition in the bar.
Researchers in Germany have developed a table football (foosball, table soccer, whatever) robot. The human challenger(s) take the red team, while the machine works the blue side, using an overhead video camera to see what's happening on the table. The conference paper shows that while the machine generally wins against the normal bar-amatuer it has no chance against a human grandmaster. But these kinds of things are always improving, after all look how big a deal the man-machine chess competition turned out to be. So perhaps the current table football world champions should be watching their backs."
but does the computer have full control over all the umm (forgive my foosball knowledge) "handles" at all time. I mean part of the game is having to let go and grab the next one. Kind of an unfair advantage if the computer does not have to do so.
I'll be impressed when they have a robot/AI that can play ping-pong. If you look at the plane the ball travels in, foosball is pretty two-dimensional...not entirely, I'll grant you, but I'm making a generalization. If you can create a robot that can deal with three dimensions, and can build strategies to play a good game of ping-pong, then I'll be impressed.
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Chess is a thinking game. The idea of a machine being able to out think or out strategize a human fosters competition, so that's where the excitement in that lies. Foosball is simply hand eye coordination. I have no doubts that a machine will eventually be able to out manuever me in hitting a ball with a little plastic man on a rod. It his hardly the technical coup of a computer beating one of the best chess players in the world.
I think it would be pretty much impossible to make a tournament-level competitive player this way.
50FPS is way too slow to react to even a simple three-man push shot. Humans generally can't see the ball when it's done well; they have to build up the skill to Just Know where the ball's going to go. It would be very easy to put some tiny variation into the shot that would completely throw off an AI.
Plus, the AI only models the field and the playing figures, so it can't respond to poker-style cues a human opponent might give off, like a slight pretensioning of the forearm, that would indicate when the shot would be attempted.
It would be amazing for practice drills though, both offensive and defensive.
Hey once one of the amusement table manufacturers sees this, I think they'd jump on the chance to develop a commercial version. Now that dotcoms aren't around anymore to put tables in their employee lounges, they probably need more revenue sources. It be coming sooner than you think. Give Kiro some smack talking ability and it'd be a hit. "Puny human, my Z-80 grandmother is faster than you!"
I've played this thing last February at the Hannover industry fair. I'm by no means a tournament-level player, but I'm not crap either, so I think I can judge this thing's playing power. It's not very good at planning shots (in fact, it's crap at that ;-)), but it's amazingly fast. Better reactions than I have ever seen in a human. And keep in mind, this was a year ago. They use motion prediction to increase the frame rate, so that isn't the limit.
I do think that they can make a tournament-level player out of this thing. Which isn't the motivation, of course, but give them two or three years.