Robot Soccer Promises Fierce Competition
By CHARLES SHEEHAN
PITTSBURGH (AP) — The competition has become more intense, the passes and shots faster and more accurate, and the players – they no longer catch fire.
Carnegie Mellon University will play host to the first American Open of robot soccer next week, a regional competition leading up to the international RoboCup 2003 in Padua, Italy, this summer.
Robotics experts say technology has advanced greatly since the first RoboCup in 1997, when a handful of teams from the United States, Australia and Japan competed for the first time.
Last year’s competition in Fukuoka, Japan, featured teams from 29 countries and drew 112,000 spectators, though organizers said the regional competition in Pittsburgh will not likely attract the same crowds.
The rules have remained largely the same, however. Once the buzzer sounds, there is no human interaction with the robots – autonomous machines that are programed to seek the ball, block opponents, pass to an open teammate and ultimately, to score.
The robots are programmed to react to thousands of possible game scenarios and communicate with each other about where the ball is and what strategy to employ.
“The first year of RoboCup we had robots catching on fire and you’d have to run and put them out. The robots would kind of crowd toward the ball and do a lot of nudging,” said Peter Stone, an assistant professor of computer science at University of Texas at Austin. “Everything is so much faster now, a lot more passing and scoring from farther out. People say it’s kind of like watching real soccer.”
Stone will lead his UT Austin Villa team in competition beginning May 1.
A future goal for competitors is to create a robotic team that can defeat a human world-champion soccer team by 2050, much in the same spirit as the chess match between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue.
There are three divisions for competitors: the Small-Size Robot League that uses color-coded wheeled robots about 10-inches square; the Sony Legged Robot League, which uses Sony AIBO robots that walk and kick the ball; and the Simulation League, which pits teams against one another in a simulated game viewed on large, overhead screens.
The crowd favorite are the AIBO robots that track the ball with a digital camera lodged in the nose and are prone to fun-bunch celebrations when a goal is scored.
Competitors say winning is nice, but the most important aspect is the competition that drives innovation and advances robotics technology.
“In 1997, the idea was really to get the robots to move around the field. If they moved in the right direction more than 50 percent of the time, it was a great thing,” said Brett Browning, a systems scientist for Carnegie Mellon. “We have reached the point where we are seeking maximum speeds, creating strategies and coding to allow the robots to adapt during play.”
There is no monetary award for the competition. The payoff, competitors say, is shared information, either from speaking with others during competition, or with the publication of source codes by successful teams.
“Why did we land a man on the moon? What was the point of the Apollo mission?” Stone asked. “Scientific challenges lead to answers and solve problems that affect people every day.”
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