RoboCup

So on Wednesday night while cooking dinner I was listening with half an ear to Talk of the Nation, on NPR, and at some point found that I was listening to a discussion about robots. They were talking to Lee Gutkind about his new book about robots, and about the future, and robots as tools, and interfacing with robots and so forth. All very interesting, all made somewhat more engaging by the very deliberate way the interviewee spoke, taking great care with every sentence he uttered. This feat rather kept my attention more than the material, which I’ll hasten to add was not uninteresting -and certainly a topic I spent a lot of my youth dreaming about especially given all the Asimov books I used to devour- but my focus was elsewhere I suppose. You can listen to the program here, and it is all certainly worth thinking about, it is a very serious and important topic, and robots (although mostly not in the form we see in our dramas on tv and in the cinema) may well dominate our society the way computers have become so central to us right now… so go right ahead and listen to what he has to say.

What finally grabbed me, this time, was not the serious “issue” material. It was this: At some point he mentioned RoboCup, an effort to construct a team of football (soccer) playing robots that can beat whoever the world cup champion is in 2050.

Somehow, this stopped me in my tracks, since it sounded vaguely familiar, but I simply was not sure if I’d actually heard of this before. (I found myself wondering “Am I the only one who does not know about this?) I reached for the computer and had a look. From their site:

RoboCup is an international joint project to promote AI, robotics, and related field. It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. RoboCup chose to use soccer game as a central topic of research, aiming at innovations to be applied for socially significant problems and industries. The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is By 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer.
In order for a robot team to actually perform a soccer game, various technologies must be incorporated including: design principles of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, […]

Ok, you get the idea. Still not sure if I’d heard it before, I remembered that, happily, YouTube exists now, so after a few keystrokes I found video.

It’s hilarious.

Ok, maybe it is just me. Maybe I am just starved for entertainment or something, (and I certainly don’t keep up with what fancy toys you can buy for kids these days), but I was wheezing and giggling away at lots of this stuff for a while. They have a world championship every year in various places, and various teams are pitted against each other. They have all sorts of teams, and I can’t get over how funny (while being really impressive) the humanoid robots playing are, made all the funnier (and this is an important part of it for me) by the very earnest humans standing on the sidelines cheering them on, and occasionally coming on to the football “field” to snatch away a robot that (for example) has stopped functioning properly.

The thing is that they do real dribbling of the ball, and actual kicks of various sorts. They seem to know where the ball is, and can follow it, and when they fall over….. they can pick themselves up! (I don’t know why that last thing is so unexpected to me, but it is.) Some of them can do dives to try to save a goal (although overall the goal-keeping leaves a lot to be desired), and its all very impressive. I would not be surprised if the engineers can develop all the marvellous technology they will need to meet their goal (after all, a team of some of the robot players I saw can probably give England’s national team a run for its money! 🙂 ) after having seen some of the video.

But mostly its just really really silly fun to look at.

Here, complete with appropriately silly techno music, is an overview of the RoboCup 2006 Humanoid League in (of course) Germany (I still can’t get over the little robot picking itself up about halfway through):

But it gets better. Here is a collection of just hilarious shots of them doing typical (pre-programmed) footballer expressions after scoring goals, etc (it seems that the Robot world already has a football star, the Bruno that stars in a lot of these videos – see also the still picture the near top of the post):

And finally, an actual game (I don’t really watch football much, but this kept me amused quite a bit):

Anyway, it’s worth taking out the few minutes to look at these if you’re as easily amused as I am sometimes.

-cvj