Hacker News Reader

Comment by esfandia | Hacker News Reader

The yearly RoboCup robot soccer championship has been going on for more than 20 years now, and it looks like the objective that they set from the beginning, which was: "By the middle of the 21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, complying with the official rules of FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup" is well within reach.

https://robocup.org/objective

View on HN

I'd be worried about injuries to the human players. The robots will probably be a lot harder than the humans.

The human players would likely be worried about that as well, potentially hobbling them with one considerable psychological disadvantage. Is there any way to mitigate that? If not, such contests may always tip in the robots favour for such sports.

Hear me out: soccer players in composite armor

Humans can be hard to humans too and then they get a yellow/red card. Same for robots in RoboCup already. A teams wanting to really go up against humans will have to be safe.

But for now the humans are still better at actual soccer than a RoboCup MSL team :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE4UopWe2lo

Robot-robot matches for some types of robot are getting more interesting though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9bLIztscyI

Come on, there's so many things happening in football that are in between no contact and yellow/red card worthy. Defenders sliding straight into the ball and tackling the attacker because of the momentum, gentle pushes between players during corners for better positioning, two players contesting the ball as it's descending from high up, etc, etc. No way anyone's doing any of that against something that has a similar build to yours, but weights much more and is all metal.

Something like volleyball or tennis which is explicitly a contactless sport? Sure, provided that robots use similar strength to push the ball, otherwise a lot of fingers will be broken. Football is never happening.

In that penalty example you've shared nothing happens and then the ball is in the goal. They're supposed to be much more physchological. Both players are supposed to pay close attention to body movement to "predict" the side and the goalkeeper is supposed to see the shooter approaching the ball to know when to react.

I think the concern is more about the strength imbalance between a robot and a human, more than the rough play itself.

Human-on-human play is already injury prone.

They could be soft by then. They should also have a comparable weight because you don't want to be on the ground under by a soft 200 kg man or robot or whatever.

However they'll win easily if they are made to be stronger and / or faster.

Strength: hard for humans to push them around and to steal the ball from and easy for them to do it to humans.

Fast: they'll just throw the ball past the defenders and run, like boys vs children. No need to use any soccer skill.

I imagine you can train the robots to play by some strict "no contact" rules. Though they'll have to expect the humans to try and push them over...

I'm sure they can be programmed to flop.

Well according to some, GPT (transformer networks) already solved it all, lmao

Since I learned about deep mind, I expected they would dominate RoboCup, but I really don't understand why they don't.

How to manage the athletic performance level of the robots? They could be made much faster and more energetic than the human players. Some might consider that cheating if they can run twice as fast, say. Can they communicate wirelessly with each other or are they limited to visual/audible cues? Skeuomorphism.

Presumably by size. What's the fasted/best, bipedal, robot weighing roughly 170 pounds that can operate for 90 minutes?

What's the intermediate step for this? What's the record for a bipedal 100m dash? For one big enough to meaningfully kick a soccer ball (even if it can't currently)? What's the 100m dash record for a robot that can also run 7+ miles over 90 minutes?

I feel like we're close -- but we're not really close. We're close on individual qualifications, but not combining them. We may genuinely be there with the control systems and computing if we had a performant robot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com