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Engineering Students Build Robotic Foosball Players

Posted by Soulskill on from the taking-over-the-world-one-table-at-a-time dept.

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."

5 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Medium Skill? by Shanrak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From TFA: "Despite this," he admits, "anyone with a fast pull shot usually sneaks it past, so more improvements on the reaction-time front are definitely necessary before the computers are ready for the big leagues." There will always be strategies players can use against computers in games like these, too difficult for the programmers to think of every possibility ahead of time. Beating the system does not take skill, but simply finding an exploit. Example from Starcraft: early on, send a single drone to attack their base, the computer will immediately send all their resource gatherers to attack your single drone, thus stopping his advancement. Repeat until you have an army to kill the computer. Cheesy, but even a novice SC player can beat the AI that way.

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    This post may or may not contain cancer causing materials.
  2. So.... by jfinke · · Score: 1, Interesting

    They came up with a hardhack version of pong?

  3. reverse engineer real sports by rlseaman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One of the more interesting aspects is that a different group engineered the defense from the offense.

    Human sports are often decomposable in similar fashions. A team may have separate coaches for attacking and defending, but more generally a sport could have a complete separation of roles. Instead of two teams each responsible for both offense and defense, a game could involve four teams in two pairs. Award points to the defenders according to saves.

    This would be trivial in sports like baseball and American football that separate the game modally - two different teams take the field each half inning, for instance. For sports like basketball or soccer, the four teams would be on the field (or court) throughout the game.

    Martial sports like Karate and fencing could become tag team events.

    A little of this nonsense would go a long way, but it might be rather entertaining in some cases.

    1. Re:reverse engineer real sports by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      That would actually make things incredibly boring. One of the aspects that makes football (soccer) interesting is the fluid definitions of roles. A good defender, especially the full backs, will play an important role in attack. Similarly, the midfielders are expected to defend. By setting up teams constrained to one role, you go back to the football of the beginning of last century.

  4. This just in... robotic cars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This is an old concept- hardly newsworthy.

    I played against a table like this at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in 2003.

    There are even sites with instructions to build your own: http://www.instructables.com/id/Autonomous-Foosball-Table/