Comment Just boys with toys? (Score 1) 52
When I read through some of the replies I get the feeling that people may perceive this competition as a pointless little toy problem. And you are partly right - it is a toy problem. But it is far from being pointless one.
To me (and I assume most of the other participants), RoboCup is about something else entirely. It is about developing new technologies on a complete systems level. Apart from finding some neat hardware solutions ranging from simple wheels to dynamic humanoid gaits the more interesting overarching theme is the advance of technology on AI aspects - such as goal oriented behavior and agent cooperation.
Sure, it is a lot about hardware and toys. You start tinkering with the hardware platform of your choice - be it some shop-bought Aibo doggy or your own awesome little humanoid creation. There is no limit but costs and human resources. And even if you are just a student with not many resources at hand you can always bring your ball-pushing Lego creation.
And it is true that a large part of the competition seems to consist of robots miserably standing and wiggling in place or randomly tipping over every other minute. But to be fair, the participants are trying to catch up on a few billion years of good old-fashioned evolution while unfortunately fighting with rather pathetic problems such as bad network connectivity and random power outages (see the comment by Spearhawk).
My point is that for most of us it is often very hard to get the proper funding and benchmarking environment for research on autonomous and self-sufficient agents exhibiting semi-intelligent behavior.
Personally, I do not care all that much about soccer. But similar to the DARPA Grand Challenge everybody understands the game and more importantly it is a good way to gain public interest in and acceptance of robotics. From a roboticist's perspective soccer is just the right mix of a fairly simple rule-based environment and open-end multi-agent complexity. The real fun starts once you have teams competing on the field - since now you have the whole real-time adaptivity thing going.
I guess my point is that you can go on and develop robots from a complete-agent perspective by solving the perfect toy problem without worrying too much about when and how the technology will benefit society and why anybody would pay for it right now.
Personally I have absolutely no doubts that the solutions found by working on a toy problem such as soccer will more or less directly benefit society in the near future. We for example are a Swiss team from ETH Zurich participating in the brand new "Nanogram League". We are able to fully control robots with sizes of only a few times the width of a human hair - and not many people in the world can do that. In about 6 months we have developed an entirely new technology just to compete in this event. And yes, it is still "simple" tasks in a two-dimensional environment.
Sure, at this point we are talking mere speculation... but there is no reason why this technology does not scale into 3D fluidic environments... in clear text: you can potentially propel tiny agents that go and find that hidden tumor somewhere in your body and destroy it... how useful would that be?
Here some illustrating movies of our robots and links to other fun stuff that might be of interest to you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnLGpl1N7Ns
http://www.iris.ethz.ch/msrl/research/special/nano gram/
some media coverage:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/07/07/AR2007070700774.html
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2007/07/07/s chneider.robocup.competition.cnn
To me (and I assume most of the other participants), RoboCup is about something else entirely. It is about developing new technologies on a complete systems level. Apart from finding some neat hardware solutions ranging from simple wheels to dynamic humanoid gaits the more interesting overarching theme is the advance of technology on AI aspects - such as goal oriented behavior and agent cooperation.
Sure, it is a lot about hardware and toys. You start tinkering with the hardware platform of your choice - be it some shop-bought Aibo doggy or your own awesome little humanoid creation. There is no limit but costs and human resources. And even if you are just a student with not many resources at hand you can always bring your ball-pushing Lego creation.
And it is true that a large part of the competition seems to consist of robots miserably standing and wiggling in place or randomly tipping over every other minute. But to be fair, the participants are trying to catch up on a few billion years of good old-fashioned evolution while unfortunately fighting with rather pathetic problems such as bad network connectivity and random power outages (see the comment by Spearhawk).
My point is that for most of us it is often very hard to get the proper funding and benchmarking environment for research on autonomous and self-sufficient agents exhibiting semi-intelligent behavior.
Personally, I do not care all that much about soccer. But similar to the DARPA Grand Challenge everybody understands the game and more importantly it is a good way to gain public interest in and acceptance of robotics. From a roboticist's perspective soccer is just the right mix of a fairly simple rule-based environment and open-end multi-agent complexity. The real fun starts once you have teams competing on the field - since now you have the whole real-time adaptivity thing going.
I guess my point is that you can go on and develop robots from a complete-agent perspective by solving the perfect toy problem without worrying too much about when and how the technology will benefit society and why anybody would pay for it right now.
Personally I have absolutely no doubts that the solutions found by working on a toy problem such as soccer will more or less directly benefit society in the near future. We for example are a Swiss team from ETH Zurich participating in the brand new "Nanogram League". We are able to fully control robots with sizes of only a few times the width of a human hair - and not many people in the world can do that. In about 6 months we have developed an entirely new technology just to compete in this event. And yes, it is still "simple" tasks in a two-dimensional environment.
Sure, at this point we are talking mere speculation... but there is no reason why this technology does not scale into 3D fluidic environments... in clear text: you can potentially propel tiny agents that go and find that hidden tumor somewhere in your body and destroy it... how useful would that be?
Here some illustrating movies of our robots and links to other fun stuff that might be of interest to you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnLGpl1N7Ns
http://www.iris.ethz.ch/msrl/research/special/nan
some media coverage:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2007/07/07/
