Slashdot Mirror
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."
FTA: 'After a year of software development and testing, the team and faculty consultant Sebastion Fischmeister demoed their bionic foosball superstars in January 2009 at the university's Senior Design Symposium to a positive reception.'
Guess Beckham et al. are safe for a while...
I don't understand why this is a /. story.
This has been done before by an Austrian University?
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Tischfussball-Roboter-aus-Oberoesterreich--/meldung/135390
(German)
I wonder how the "players" would do if they had their positions switched. Would the algorithms want re-writing?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
That didn't take long at all.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
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.
This post may or may not contain cancer causing materials.
I for one welcome our new foosball playing, robotic overlords.
They came up with a hardhack version of pong?
Build a robotic bully which will go back to our high school and beat up all those mean kids who took our lunch money!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I remember reading about a robot called TriKiTrain at a college in Austria a while ago.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Tischfussball-Roboter-aus-Oberoesterreich--/meldung/135390
Of course, it's in German. I didn't find any english articles on it, but google translator might help.
This is great. Now we no longer need to take the time needed to engage in amusement activities and we can concentrate on more important things, like tetherball. And to all those people worried about fun loss, more people will be needed to repair the robots that play the games, which is even more fun!
Google robotic beer pong.
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.
'Full-back' refers to a wide defensive player in football - the second row on a foosball table features two full-backs and two centre-backs, and should be referred to as 'defence'. 'Half-back' refers to a position which isn't even used in football these days - the third row on a foosball table is simply 'midfield'.
For the Brits here, Foosball is table football. No idea why it's called that over there. Maybe from the German, Fußball?
Get your own free personal location tracker
At what point did it become passe to do meaningful work as an engineering student?
A completely valid point. How about building something "useful"?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This video is being hosted on the discovery channel and they have two stories before the robotic foosball player
http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/daily-planet/february-2009/daily-planet-february-3-2009/#clip136425
Call me when your puny machine can play the king of all arcade games, USA vs USSR bubble hockey.
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/
Some fellow students of mine built this project years ago at Georgia Tech for their senior design project. I believe they only had 4 people working on it as well. The final product functioned well, and reacted quickly.
My group built a fully automated electro-mechanical chess board (nothing new here either). Any other cool projects out there?
It has been said that 63% of all statistics are made up
Come on, they're going to spend the rest of their careers working on useful - and incredibly dull - things like dishwasher door bearings or toilet flush controllers.
So let them have a bit of fun. Even if the device is frivolous, isn't the point to demonstrate and apply the subject matter learned on the course?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Too bad there's so much "let's shake the camera all around and do a bunch of rapid scene changes with weird angles so we're hip and cool" going on that you can't actually see anything.
That's not a Tornado! What kinda crap are they trying to pull??
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.
How exactly is this news? A German student did this in 2001 for his MS thesis, and the robot has been commercially available since 2003 from one of the larger German gambling machine vendors (site in German, but has photos and videos of the commercial version).
not an easy job to develop a robot...really admire their efforts.
Grass-Mud Horse http://mymaleandgebi.blogspot.com/
Here is a link to some foosball robot videos http://www.foosball.com/forum/index.php?topic=1389.0
I remembered someone had build the same thing back in 2002, in RoboCup 2002 conference and competitions in Fukuoka - Japan.