We posted a lot of footage from RoboCup 2014 last Friday, but we didn't post any footage from the final game in the tournament, where the winning mid-size robot team plays against a bunch of not-entirely inept humans. Arguably, this is the most exciting game of all, because it gives a sense of what the current state-of-the-art in robotic soccer is, and how it stacks up to a team of moderately talented squishy bipeds.
We're still waiting on the entire game to be posted, but in the meantime, this is incredibly awesome:
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!
This is not the first time robots score against humans in RoboCup. But the key thing here is that the goals scored by robots are getting better because the robots are getting better. In fact, not to get all soccer-y on you, this play was very far from dumb luck: Tech United Eindhoven's robots made a pass, the striker robot looked at the goal and saw a defender in the way, decided not to shoot, made a pass instead, and the wing robot put it right into the side of the goal. Most of the humans weren't particularly aggressive, but the defender dude looked like he was actually trying pretty hard there, and he couldn't stop the attack.
RoboCup's goal is to make this work with humanoid robots, but I'm not sure what the point is of doing that, besides that it would give the robots artificial ankles to grab after they fall over in dramatic fashion. But seriously, I could imagine a team of these mid-size robots potentially defeating a determined team of humans on a small field within the next decade.
To get an idea of how much progress has been made in RoboCup midsize over the last several years, here's a bunch of vids that we found on YouTube of midsize robots vs. humans matches from RoboCups past (the robots vs. humans has become a tradition). We couldn't find all of them, so if you have better footage of these games, definitely let us know.
RoboCup 2007
Â
RoboCup 2009
Â
RoboCup 2010
Â
RoboCup 2011
Â
RoboCup 2012
Â
[ RoboCup 2014 ] via [ Tech United ]
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.
