For the first time Britain competed in the Robot World Cup in Istanbul, a tournament with the ultimate goal of fostering the progression of Artificial Intelligence and their website states that the ultimate goal is to have robots that can beat the top human team in the world at football before 2050.
Their “RoboCupSoccer” focus is around the game of football, where all the robots are fully autonomous and are literally designed to play a game of football. The humanoid league in RoboCupSoccer requires that the robots be fully autonomous with a human-styled body plan, and human-like senses to play football against each other. For example visual perception of not just the ball, but other players, the field, the goal, but also distinquishing friend from foe on the field. Let alone actually having to be able to walk, run, or kick the ball while maintaing balance, let alone aiming it well.
Another league in the RoboCupSoccer is the Soccer Standard Platform League which supplies Aldebaran’s Nao humanoid robots in which the challenge is the complete focus on developing the software for the robots. Having the robots be able to decide whether its looking at the ball, looking at the goal, working out where it is on the pitch etc. The robots are also having to attempt to communicate with each other and use strategy and plan things. For instance being able to communicate to his teammate robots that he’d block for his teammate who currently has the ball.
Britain’s team for the RoboCup sadly lost in the group stages, the four-strong team from Edinburgh University. The team coach has claimed that they will return next year with a vastly improved side, “we learned that our core technology is not that bad even though we have not been very successful.”
“Almost all the bugs that stopped us were because we were not match ready.” Dr Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Head coach of Edinferno.
The British team did compete in the Standard Platform League using the Nao robots, so atleast they do not have to work worry about the hardware, they can focus soley on the programming. The British side feels that one of the main problems with the performance of the British side was due to the lack of competition within the UK, so there is nobody for the team to hone their skills against and work out all the bugs.
