10th Annual RoboCup

Aryabhata writes "As soccer fever continues the 10th RoboCup also got to a start. 400 teams fight it out in 11 different leagues including onces designed for humanoid to four legged robots. "The organizers of the tournament hope that in 2050 the winners of the RoboCup will be able to beat the human World Cup champions".
Beyond the novelty value, the cup enables 2,500 experts in artificial intelligence and robot engineering to meet and test their latest ideas. The championships is followed by a 2 day conference where the teams can dissect their play and work."

Comments

2050

[rbarreira]

In 2050, the question "Is a team of robots capable of beating a team of humans in football?" will be irrelevant (or at least very different from what it is now). What is a human? Do "cyborg-like" modifications to one's body allow him to be considered human? Etc etc...

Re:2050

[mustafap]

Well lets look at what current footballers are like. Mostly dumb, and very vain.

We have dumb robots, so we just have to work on the 'vain' bit over the next 44 years.

Press release for Sango and Ami

[technoextreme]

http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060608_robocup.ht ml The competition is not just about robots preforming soccer. There are two other events that are completely unrelated to soccer. One event is search and rescue and the newest competition involves domestic applications. PS. This is probably the only time I will ever watch a soccer event.

power

[roman_mir]

Actually I don't doubt that from point of view of mechanics and programming robots that beat humans in all kinds of sport can be built, but will these robots have power cables running to them? Or will the robot team have to replace the batteries on each robot every 10 minutes, that is what I would like to know. How will these robots be powered? For the longest time it has been a tradition in sci-fi stories to have autonomous robots that don't need to recharge every 10 minutes, it is assumed that in the future the problem of battery capacity is somehow resolved. Some robots use built in fission plants, some use fusion plants, some use batteries of unexplained nature, but they can run for days or even years without recharging. If we could actually do something like that, then the life on this planet could become interesting again.

Re:power

[roman_mir]

But a human cannot push 3 tons of steel at a constant speed of 150km/h for hours and hours and in fact for as long, as there is fuel.

Sure, living organisms are very efficient at what they do, but we are not talking about living organisms.

Calculating chemical power requirements for living cells and organisms that comprise of living cells is not that different from calculating power requirements for a 100W lightbulb. Sure, living organisms are efficient in using chemical energy, but these chemicals in themselves are not the best storage mechanism for machines, that need lots of power instantly. That's why excavators burn petrol byproducts for power and not potato chips.

By the way a car for example can in principle use solar power directly, but a human cannot. A human has to wait for a plant to use the solar power and then a human can eat the plant. This is an inderect way to retrieve power and it is not the most efficient way.

The question still stands

[giorgiofr]

Can a working human mind ultimately be reduced to a complicated algorithm? Will we be able to emulate it, given the necessary computing power?

For the 10000th time,

[Ireneo Funes]

It's called FOOTBALL.

Games as an AI research platform.

[Black Parrot]

> Beyond the novelty value, the cup enables 2,500 experts in artificial intelligence and robot engineering to meet and test their latest ideas.

FYI, though RoboCup has been around for a long time, the past few years have seen a sudden surge of interest in the use of games as a platform for AI research. In addition to the now vast literature on RoboCup there are several new conferences dedicated to AI and games, usually covering non-RoboCup topics. Grep the net for Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG), and the Special Session on Games at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). I've seen some of the proceedings on line, and you can find some pretty interesting papers about applications, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

robocup 2006 home page

[martyb]

The BEEB's blurb was interesting, but here is a link to the RoboCup 2006 home page

There are pics, background, schedules, leagues, etc.

Re:Silly northamericans.

[zippthorne]

Me either, but it certainly is odd to call a sport football in which the ball is a nearly perfect sphere and not in any way shaped like a foot.

It's over already

[SmilingBoy]

"As soccer fever continues the 10th RoboCup also got to a start."

It got to a start four days ago and finished at about the same time as this story was posted!

Anyway, I was quite impressed - watched lots of it through an internet live stream. The humanoids still have a way to go, but in a few years, it will look much better.

There are lots of videos on http://www.robocup.zdf.de/ (in German).

SmilingBoy.

Re:2050? Yeah, right.

[CrazyJim1]

Would you play against a plastics/metal body?
Well after that yellow card, things are getting rough out there on the field. And look, the robots are putting in their hooligan who used to be a battlebot.

The real question is...

[Alicat1194]

How well will the robots be able to fake injuy?

Ow! Ref! The human just kicked me in my power coupler! The pain! The pain! ::convincing limp::...