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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."
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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For the Brits here, Foosball is table football. No idea why it's called that over there. Maybe from the German, Fußball?
"Foosball" does come from the German word. The game increased in popularity in the USA in the wake of WWII, although the first American patent dates to 1901. One helpful article to read is http://www.foosball.com/learn/knowledge/chp1hist.html from the book The Complete Book Of Foosball (Lott & Brainard, 1980)
I've never heard an exact explanation for why Foosball (or just Foos) specifically caught on as a name. Maybe "table soccer" is just too awkward. Obviously, Americans couldn't call it "table football," since football is a different sport there.
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.