Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

I, Foos: Robotic Foosball Device Enables Solo Play

Posted by timothy on from the if-you're-only-semi-sociable dept.

thehomeland writes "NewScientist.com reports of a new device produced by Bernhard Nebel at the University of Freiburg in Germany that allows one to play foosball solo -- with a robotic opponent. May be available next year for 20,000 Euros." What about ping-pong?

2 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. That can't work! by NashCarey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So much in this game has to do with the strange ball physics. Like putting the right spins while trying to blast the ball past the defender. I cannot immagine this technology to be so advanced to do things that real competitive players will find remotely challenging. Not to mention after programming the computer to possibly track the ball and what not, then to try to program artificial intelligence to make sure you aren't exploiting same weaknesses over and over.

    I am wondering if they will somehow design a way to play pool againsht a computer.

  2. Re:What about ping-pong? by ArmorFiend · · Score: 5, Funny

    There once was a Robotics program that did make a ping-pong robot. It was good. Real good. Had a robot arm, swatted the ping pong ball like it was Forrest Gump.

    I think this was CMU.

    Anyway, they were going to demo this to the board of trustees. They'd tested it lots, but since it was an important demo they set it up and gave a test run before the trustees came in. It performed perfectly.

    The demo began. On the first serve the robot froze and locked up. The trustees and researchers gathered in around it to try to analyze the problem. The robot un-froze and smacked a trustee in the forehead.

    What was going on? They'd written the robot's AI in a garbage collected language. In all their relatively short test runs they'd never triggered the GC. By running the pre-demo test, then leaving the machine warm, they'd used up all their heap, and on the first ball it'd decided to GC. This was old hardware and took several minutes (during which time people gathered in around it). When it came out of GC, it had finally computed where to swing the paddle to hit that (long dead) ball. Unfortunately that was the exact same region of space as the trustees head. SMAK!