MESSI v the
Machine was how some commentators touted the World Cup final, inspired by the
disciplined way the German team dismantled Brazil in the semi-finals. But
despite such caricatures of Teutonic precision, German players are only human.
So as the latest edition of RoboCup, a competition for robot soccer players
rather than flesh-and-blood ones, kicks off on July 19th in João Pessoa,
Brazil’s easternmost city, a question that will be on many minds is: when will
real machines conquer the sport? When the first RoboCup was held, in 1997,
those who launched it set a target of 2050 for engineers to produce a humanoid
robot team that would rival the champions of the older competition. Judged by
the plodding clumsiness of some of the RoboCup players, that goal might seem
far-fetched. But it is easy to underestimate how quickly robotics is improving.
Self-driving cars and delivery drones, which seemed hopelessly futuristic just
a decade ago, are now topics of serious business interest.
By comparison
with the corporate investments of the likes of Google in electric cars, the
teams competing in this year’s RoboCup have shoestring budgets. But the
tournament includes features that the organisers hope will accelerate innovation
without the incentive of cash. One is a clever combination of competition and
co-operation. Leading up to the playoffs, teams prepare new strategies and
fine-tune their hardware and software in secret. Immediately after the finals
have been played, however, all must publish their methods, thus raising the bar
for everyone the following year. Another feature is that there are limits to
how far teams can push their hardware, to encourage them to develop smart
routes to victory, rather than using mere brute force. RoboCup range from a
little league of miniature cylinders on wheels, in which each entire team is
controlled by one computer using input from overhead cameras, to a fully limbed
humanoid league, akin to R2-D2’s faithful companion, C-3PO.
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