|
|
More Pages... |
|
Soccer-playing bots bask in world victory
By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: July 19, 2005
Brazil may be the world soccer champ, but this week, a slew of
other countries shared the glory as robotic equivalents in a
competition just as fiercely watched.
Winners of RoboCup 2005, the annual world cup of robotics
soccer, emerged after a five-day competition in Osaka, Japan,
where artificially intelligent, soccer-playing bots fought for
goals while computer scientists cheered them on from the
sidelines.
Team Osaka, with its human-modeled VisiON robot from Vstone and
the Robo Garage at Kyoto University, won several titles in its
category, including the "Louis Vuitton Humanoid Cup" for best
biped humanoid. It also bested Germany's NimbRo, from the
University of Freiburg, in a technical challenge and in the 2
vs. 2 kid-size competition for humanoids.
Germany's FU-Fighters, from Freie University in Berlin, turned
around and beat Cornell University's Big Red from New York in
the small-size league, in which robots are no more than 18
centimeters (about 7 inches) in diameter and play with an orange
golf ball on a field the size of a ping pong table.
About 330 teams from 31 countries competed in the soccer events
that drew robotic participants from a two-legged humanoid robot
league to a four-legged league using teams of Sony's Aibo robots
as players. A team of six programmers from Spelman College in
Georgia (one of only five U.S. teams) was the only undergraduate
institution and the only all-women's institution to qualify for
the Osaka competition, but the team did not place.
In the four-legged competition, teams of four entertainment
robots played using an orange ball, with all the computation was
done on the board computer. In that race, Germany's University
of Bremen in Berlin beat out Australia's NuBots from the
University of Newcastle.
RoboCup is designed to advance research and education about
robotics and artificial intelligence, and is followed by a
two-day symposium on the topic. Its lofty goal by 2050 is to
assemble an autonomous humanoid soccer team that will compete
and win against the World Cup Soccer champions, in compliance
with the official FIFA rules.
Computer scientists behind RoboCup chose soccer over say, chess,
because it's not only a popular sport worldwide, but it also
poses many of the same dynamic challenges in life that are
problems for artificially intelligent objects. Those include
identifying relevant objects (robots determine this by color),
playing in harmony with a team, and working with moving
challengers.
The humanoid robots can perform basic skills of soccer players,
such as shooting the ball or defending goals. Sometimes,
however, humans have to intervene in play because some of the
robots are tele-operated.
|
|
