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."

Comments

Medium Skill?

[Shanrak]

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.