Robots to win the World Cup in 40 years?
Posted on July 2nd, 2010 in General
While this year’s edition of the World Cup is taking place in South Africa, a slightly different version is being played out at the Suntect Convention Centre in Singapore. The 2010 RoboCup aims to recreate football matches using small, independent robots. The ultimate aim of the tournament is to build towards the construction of human-sized, autonomous robots that can, hopefully by the year 2050, take on a team of the world’s best players – and win.
The robots are controlled from a computer watching from a camera above the pitch, which is charged with positioning one of the five robots on the team on the ball at all times. This year’s tournament sees a new development in the technology – a new physics-based algorithm programmed into the robots gives them a sense of anticipation of where the action on the field is likely to unfold net.
For example, while dribbling the robots now have a sense of if and when they might lose control of the ball and can adjust, giving them an edge over previous robots that can only react after they lose control. This new algorithm, mimicking a human player’s real intuition, gives the robots one more valuable skill-set that could eventually lead to true artificial intelligence, and maybe even a future World-Cup winning team comprised of robots!
Read more about the story here
Also, here’s a Youtube video of the robots in action:
