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."