Well, I went to the finals of the robocup, in Melbourne. That's the
soccer-playing robots, for the unitiated; see here for details:
I only saw the second half of the finals for the bigger robots. These look
like suped-up kitchen pedal bins.
It's a pretty fun thing to watch, actually. It was Freiburg vs Golem, the
germans vs the italians. It came down to 3-3, penalty shootout, with the
match going to the germans.
The robots looked fairly similar, although they seemed to have some
qualitative differences; the Freiburg robots (pink tops) seemed to be faster
and slightly more accurate, whilst the Golem robots (blue collars) appeared
to be slightly more agile, able to rotate on the spot.
Sometimes they seemed pretty smart; seeing one of the Golem robots shoot
across the front of the goals to a robot on the other side (just missed the
pass, unfortunately, otherwise it would have been a goal for sure), that was
pretty impressive. On the other hand, the Golem robots at one point started
heading for the wrong goal, just as they were on the verge of scoring.
One thing they shared, was a very marginal ability to cope with realtime
operation; often, they would pause on the spot, "thinking" for a second or
so, before taking action.
Their programming seemed relatively brittle; they couldn't cope with much
surprise in their environment (like a person standing in front of them).
They tended to need to be hand placed on different parts of the field. They
looked, as I said, like little garbage bins.
For all that, I appreciate the complexity of the task, and see that a lot of
ground is being covered. Very cool stuff.
Here's the Robocup aim:
By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous robot soccer players shall
win a soccer game (complying with the official FIFA rules) against the human
winners of the World Cup.
They've got a way to go. Keep plugging away!
Emlyn
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