Artificial Intelligence and Robotics blog
Posts tagged robot soccer
International Humanoid Robot Olympic Games
Nov 8th
The Chinese have just announced that they intend to hold the first ever International Humanoid Robot Olympic Games in the city of Harbin possibly in June 2010. There are few details about the event other than what was posted in a brief article on CCTV’s website; you can read the article here.
The organizers are busy trying to find sponsors for the robot Olympics while they expect 100 Universities from 20 countries will send robots to compete. The Olympics will be exclusive to humanoid robots. The events will be a mixture of traditional Olympic sports such as track and field and more robotics related activities such as doing housework.
The organizers claim that the robot Olympics are designed to help make more intelligent robots for use at home. The Humanoid Olympic Games will be competing with the well established RobotCup competition which attracts much attention every year. Robot rescue and robot soccer are the two main events with the latter having the longest history in robotics competitions (see our previous stories “Robot soccer: Then and now!” and “RoboCup: When and why did robots start playing soccer? for more information”.)
I am curious to see if the Humanoid Olympics actually take place and if so how many Universities will be able to take part. More importantly, it is amazing to me that in 2009, we can start thinking about robotics competitions that involve only humanoid robots and expect many participants. It goes to show how quickly the field of robotics has advanced in the last decade.
Robot soccer: Then and now!
Jul 11th
Just a couple of days ago, we had the conclusion of the 2007 edition of the annual RoboCup tournament held at Georgia Tech. The event which has exploded in popularity in recent years includes a variety of different soccer playing robots both physical and simulation as well as other events such as the robot rescue competition and numerous industrial and academic demonstrations.
You can find lots of video footage and photos from RoboCup events on YouTube and Flickr but I want to use this post to show you the progress that we have made in robotics during the last 15 years. Alan Mackworth from the University of British Columbia was the first person to suggest that soccer was the perfect domain for testing artificial intelligence. He talked about this in a couple of papers back in 1992 and 1993; because of that, the International RoboCup Foundation has named him “The Founding Father” of robot soccer. His research team at the Laboratory for Computation Intelligence at UBC constructed the first ever soccer playing robots, the Dynamo and Dynamites. So, without further delay, here is a video circa 1993 that showcases these robots using constraint programming to perform basic soccer maneuvers for goalkeeping and shooting.
So, how advanced is robot soccer today? 15 years later, small humanoid robots have become increasingly prevalent in RoboCup. From having simple demonstrations of humanoid robots kicking the ball just a 3 years ago, the event now hosts a number of 2 vs 2 humanoid events added to the 4-legged AIBO and the many wheeled robot leagues. As you can see from the 2007 RoboCup video bellow, we have come a long way since 1992.
The next 5-10 years are going to be very exciting. Hopefully, we will start to see more cooperation between the robots executing plays that require coordination and cooperation such as passing the ball or defending as a team. For that to happen, we will need better reasoning algorithms but also robot bodies that are more responsive and with better sensing. Considering the fast development of such technologies, I am fairly certain that such advanced soccer playing robots will soon become reality.
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