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Robot Dominates Air Hockey, Adapts To Opponents' Playing Style
colinneagle writes "Researchers at Chiba University in Japan have developed a robot that could frustrate teenagers worldwide with its impressive air hockey skills. What's remarkable about this air hockey-playing robot, which is not the first of its kind, is that it can sense human opponents' playing styles and adapt to defend against them. The key is how the computer controlling the robot views its opponent — at a speed of 500 frames per second. From there, the robot uses a three-layer control system to determine motion control, when it should hit the puck, defend its goal or stay still, and a third that determines how it should react to its opponent's playing style."
It's only 41 years late...
I'm not signing anything
3... 2... 1.. Fight!
that's like, brilliant.
but why the need for a robot to demonstrate this? would be more fun as an online game demonstration. more accessible at least.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You just have to hack it.
Shufflepuck Cafe, anybody?
Maybe it's cheaper to sample a lot, rather than to sample less and extrapolate accelerations. They probably get away with a simpler prediction algorithm when their data points are so dense. Or maybe, the way the puck moves in air hockey is more sensitive to initial (impact) conditions than you realize. I'm guessing that in the 50th of a second before you hit the puck, you can do a lot of things to significantly affect its trajectory. Anyway, maybe that's what they discovered as they built this system - something about the game itself.
The Japanese have solved air hockey. Now I'm waiting for Koreans to create the perfect AI computer to play Starcraft 2. (And I'm not talking about this guy.) The AI that comes with the game is inexcusably pathetic.
Am I the only one who can see that the robot missed a puck at the end of the video? I can clearly see the puck hitting the back border!
Many times actually, but not inside the goal area.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Shawn Thornton kicks its shiny metal ass.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Next thing you know, robots will beat us at Foosball! We can't let this happen!
but can the robot go on the offensive?
Actually, 50 fps is probably not enough. When my son and I get going we can get the puck from one side to the other in substantially less than fifth of a second. Given that the robot probably needs to start moving very quickly after the opponent hits the puck you'd only have a couple of frames to work with at that speed. Half the time when I lose a point I haven't even seen the puck before it's in the goal. (Getting hit by a flying puck at those speeds hurts like hell. I thought I broke my finger once)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The original post could have been dropped on almost any story and be just as irrelevant.
In air hockey the puck moves on a two dimensional surface. This makes this game exceptionally easy for robots because they don't need to do complicated three dimensional calculations that would be needed to hit and aim a ball moving in the air. Furthermore, since the puck is hit with a round mallet, it's going to be fairly easy to compute where the puck will go after it's been hit--something that won't work even with a game as simple as foosball, never mind table tennis.
So this is much less impressive than it sounds.
One of my favorite Mac games was an air hockey one with various robot opponents.
This robot, assuming it even can lose, is just a few months of speedup away from being fast enough to block any possible human strike. For offense, they would probably have to speed limit it from hitting 200mph shots and ace every time.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.