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Engineering Students Build Robotic Foosball Players
Andre writes "As their final-year project, an eight-man team of fourth-year electrical and computer-engineering students at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, constructed a robot-controlled, motor-and-actuator foosball table capable of playing against human opponents in a two-on-two fashion; one mechanical player controls two defensive rods (goalies and full-backs) and the other controls two offensive rods (half-backs and forwards). They considered the computers 'medium-skilled' players in that they were very competitive against beginners and fairly competitive against intermediates."
Bzzt...wrong, buddy. He's using the terms correctly. Take your cultural blinders off and try to see things from a perspective other than your own, for once.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Umm... This is an experimental platform that can track a massive 3-dimensional object, calculate its position and build a sufficient model of where it's going (at least as good as a human being), and then actuate mechanisms (with their own inherent delay, displacement, physical characteristics, and nonlinearities w/r/t the ball) in order to cause a state change in the ball, with the goal of delivering the ball to a set of state vectors at the goal.
It seems "silly," but there's dozens of very difficult engineering problems to be solved here, and all of this is relates to real-world problems. The sorts of problems can often lead to new thinking about old, "serious" problems and novel solutions.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.