Show HN: Foosbar – My autonomous foosball-playing robot | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Foosbar – My autonomous foosball-playing robot

github.com

323 pointsmisprit777 comments

This is extremely cool! I think the next step is to put both sides of the table under robotic control and have an online competition for the best foosball-playing AI. I would tune in every week to see different AIs duke it out.

That sounds a lot more fun than AWS DeepRacer.

+1 - Yes please

I’ve thought about this for other things but never foosball. It’s actually a great application.

Great job. Both on your build as well as your entertaining video. Makes me miss the days of in-person working where we spent a LOT of time on the foosball table. To the point where we built an automatic score tracking system complete with dashboards, ELO, seasons, tournament mode, etc. You simply swiped your badge on the table and with a few infrared sensors it kept score and automatically updated your stats as well as the live score feeds. Good times.

This is the FAANGest comment ever. I love it.

It needs fintech

It was the best of times. However not at a FAANG but a smaller shop with roughly 100 engineers.

I'm really curious how this would've looked if he'd taken a mid-range budget approach to vision instead of being able to throw (tens of?) thousands of dollars of industrial motion capture cameras at it. Something like 2-4 global shutter cameras, all running a similar vision filter to what he first demo'd, feeding a kalman filter/state estimator to determine the ball's position. I can't blame hime for following the mantra of "don't build what you can buy (or get from a sponsor)" but it would be cool to see some affordable solutions (or attempted solutions) to this problem.

There was a post on HN where someone did positional tracking with cheap $5 Playstation Eye cameras and some infrared LEDs, so its definitely do-able.

(I'm the person who made it) Yeah that's fair, but at least for me I wanted to focus on the interesting part of "making a foosball robot" which is the "foosball" part, not the "fiddle with a home built vision system that doesn't actually work" part. I realize this is a bit ironic given my channel name though haha (From Scratch).

What a good idea for a project. CNC-ifying things is quite fun, but at some point you've seen everyone build a 3D printer, CNC router, CNC mill, CNC grinder, etc. from scratch. This is new, though, and I love it.

Obviously, this kid's going places ...

yupp

(You know, I humbly accept the downvotes and all, but ...

... I really meant it in good faith: If he is tackling these sort of problems from his bedroom ...

... what can we expect of him futher down the road?)

Hopefully he'll automate something that will improve the quality of life for everyone.

Cynical prediction, he'll just make fun YouTube projects. And probably have better working conditions for himself.

The ellipsis feels sarcastic btw, if you did not understand where the downvotes are coming from.

Thanks for taking the time.-

As someone who uses ellipsis often, but certainly never with sarcasm in mind, this was fascinating and shocking to me to learn this. I also want to appreciate @bluestein’s graceful response to the misunderstanding.

Least I could do :)

PS. Honestly also both fascinated and shocked to learn about the new use that ellipsis is finding. Color me surprised.-

I wonder if it has anything to do with the joke format, "that's a nice tie... not." which sets up the victim and then delivers a gut punch. Perhaps it has conditioned a skepticism towards ellipses.

I didn't interpret your comment as bad will, but I'm glad this opened an interesting conversation about language!

Apparently younger people find ellipses come across as passive-aggresive… which is often not what the older writer is trying to convey.

https://www.purewow.com/tech/why-do-boomers-use-ellipses

How old is he?

> It has successfully mechanized all my joy out of the game, leaving me free to pursue <a>more important and deeply fulfilling things</a> with my life.

The link [1] then shows us that this person most certainly is on top of their game :) Beautiful write-up and video, and amazing project. Thanks for sharing.

[1] https://github.com/misprit7/computerraria

Impressive!

Are there always three players in the goalie position? I seem to remember playing with one goalie (1-2-5-3 players), but that’s a while ago.

I've never seen a table with 3 players in the goalie position in my life.

3 is tournament play at least in the US if i recall

Image search for “foosball table” shows lots of tables with 3 goalies. The one I played on as a kid had 3 goalies as well.

The tables I've seen with one goalie have raised corners so that the ball doesn't get stuck there. You see it more on budget tables in my experience.

Or on official tables according to the International Table Soccer Federation.

From what I've seen during my travels, there are lot of variations for foosball tables. Each countries seem to have their own variations.

Official tables can have either style.

There are quite a few tables that are considered tournament grade by the various table soccer associations, including ITSF (I think at least six manufacturers at this point?). In the US, Tornado is the most common tournament table by far and has a 3-man goalie bar, but many European tables like Bonzini or Garlando have the 1-man and raised corners.

Lots of different types. I have even once seen a XXL size in a bar (something like https://www.abbeyroadentertainment.com/rentals-and-services/...).

Thanks for all the answers. Perhaps it’s a US/Europe thing.

At least the official table of the International Table Soccer Federation only has one goalie, and raised corners.

https://www.tablesoccer.org/tables/leonhart.php

Now I need to quickly climb out of this rabbit hole before I start to dig into the 41 page rule book. https://www.tablesoccer.org/rules/documents/Standard_Matchpl...

Surprised any federation would have anything other than a Bonzini table, honestly it's barely even a game IMHO unless you play it on one of those.

Tornados are better

That's just the Leonhart. There are a number of other manufacturers that are approved for various types of tournaments including Tornado, which is most common in US tournaments and has a 3-man goalie bar.

https://www.tablesoccer.org/tornado

The single goalie w the corner ramps was a late 1970s into the 80s things. Those are now less common as some competive foosball uses the three man rear, but there is one or more exceptions. I did the researh for my coed fraternity reunion, very hard to find the classic ramp tables, as they were made of particle board and degrade. The one company w ramps uses a more gentle slope rather than an added steep corner ramp.

It's a speciality of the Tornado tables which are mostly used in the US. It was introduced as a cost saving measure, because four additional figures are cheaper than a curved playing surface.

The curved corners in a traditional table are of course necessary to avoid the ball being dead in the corners. With three players you don't need a curved corner and can still always get the ball.

Here is a video of the ITSF world cup, where you can see that there is just a single goalie on every side: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3vnrAIOWDwo&pp=ygUOaXRzZiB3b3J...

There is actually a quite interesting documentary out there which tells the rise and fall of foosball in the US which is tightly coupled with the company behind the Tornado tables if I remember correctly. I saw it on Youtube a while a ago, but could not find it now. Might have been "Foosballers" but I am nit sure.

This is awesome. I'd love to have this for home practice.

But can the robot shit talk? As a fellow lover of foosball I find that shit talking is ingrained in the culture as demoralizing an opponent (see Community) is a big part of winning at the highest level and should be the next step. I think a committed foosball player might end up creating the first true AGI just for proper shit talking.

Foosball is a tabletop game without general cultural respect (like table tennis does as an olympic sport) or chess, but while robots can easily beat me at chess these days it looks like I'd still be able to beat a state of the art robot foosball table.

The video is very intentionally funny (in a dry way) across the board but owning your younger brother as part of it is hilarious and he was a good sport.

Yeah my man! "You've been playing good, no matter what the others say"

I was thinking about spending an hour or two hooking up a chatbot api and maybe even sending it live position/score data so it could customize it's trash talk, but in the end I just wanted to get the video out so didn't. Would have been funny though!

That’s pretty neat.

Is this guys a well known YouTuber or something? He seemed shockingly successful at getting companies to send him really high quality components.

I was wondering the same thing but this is only the second video on the account.

A well known youtuber would also ask for a bag of money

I knew I recognized him! He made a full blown CPU inside a video game called Terraria:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXPiqk0-zDY

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrwXZXGiP1w

Super impressive!

I'm kind of curious if you could track the ball with two wide angle cameras embedded in each axis of the table. I guess the players could obscure the ball doing that. Although I guess the players are raised a bit from the table, so might work?

I did wonder also if some kind of RF tracking could be used by embedding an RFID tag or similar in the ball.

Thought about both of these, for various reasons they won't work. Trust me I spent a decent amount of time on this, I think objectively making the bottom transparent with thicker acrylic is the best solution, but motion tracking is the other viable option and I wanted to play with the cameras.

So good. I had only ever played a couple of games in my life, mostly in a small pub here. I jumped into a game at a tech meetup in London about 15 year ago where I quickly found out that spinning the rod/players isn't allowed, the guy I was playing against got very upset while I was having a great time :D

This is really great. It certainly could become a product. I'm sure plenty of rich, lonely people would love to have a foosball-playing robot. In fact who wouldn't??

Also, this whole thing sounds like a competitor to Stuff Made Here. In a sense this is what Youtube was invented for. Congrats.

That was so unbelievably awesome! Even just having the idea to do it basically for fun

So cool! I played a shitload of foosball / table soccer / kicker / baby (foot). And I lived in different countries / continents and noticed there are so many variants... Some have plastic players, other little wooden players (my favorite). Some have players with flat feet, other with feet that have an angle (it's too easy IMO: way to easy to shot in diagonal: which is doable too with flat feet but requires more skill). There are some where in the corners, so that the ball doesn't get stuck, there's an inclined flat piece of wood, on others it can be a curve (I saw that in Spain / Ibiza a long time ago) then there are some where there's nothing to prevent the ball from getting stuck in a corner.

Then the rules. So many different rules. French rules are probably the weirdest where "pissette" ain't allowed in casual pub games but is allowed in official games.

As a sidenote in a science museum I got to play some foosball vs a robotic arm (which may be of interest to TFA's author) but the robot was cheating in that it could rotate the player to any angle FFS! That was quite cheesy. A little girl can be seen playing it here (8th pic in the slideshow):

http://science-center.lu/fr/explorations

OMG, the French "pissette". Last semester I was there for an internship, took me a full week to get used to it. Then there was the "râteau", used only by one of my colleagues (the strongest) when he was clearly loosing (very rare).

There seem to be some sort of tracking dots on top of some of the “players” but that didn’t seem to be mentioned in the video.

Yeah, that's so the robot knows where the human is so it can accurately make shots. I didn't mention it in the video since it was more of an implementation detail and not too important to understand what's going on.

Wow, the project is great! What's your next plan about the project?

I haven't been wowed by a demo like that in years. That was awesome!!!

This is such a cool project!! The best kind of Hacker News candy!

I hope it’s not spinning the bar. (I can’t tell from the video.)

It's not, It's doing snake shots.

Extremely cool. WAF is extremely high.

this is simply amazing

Stiga Hockey is next

He failed to build in an inebriation handicap. How would this robot perform after 3 pints?

Inebriation simulation: AI's next frontier.-

My balmer peak was at 1.75 pints and lasted thru the end of 3. Then followed by a steep decline. I agree that this would need to be modeled in the robot.

So cool.

pretty dope

That’s pretty cool, but I think you’re going to have to build out the other side too to fully remove the human from the equation

Sure, but can it play with French rules?

You'd need quite the robotic arm for repêche.

And how does it behave on "gamelles"? Asking the important questions in this thread.

What are French rules for foosball?

pissette, gamelle, repêche, rateau...

all of these are extra rules.

Off topic comment on my part here but, I’ve never noticed before that GitHub down-cases the display text of the project link at the top. I noticed it now because it’s a YouTube video also linked in the readme, and YouTube video links (and many, perhaps even most, other links) are case sensitive.

Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrwXZXGiP1w

In the top on mobile GitHub renders the text for the link instead as

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrwxzxgip1w

What an utterly weird design choice on the part of GitHub :S

No such problem in a browser. Perhaps the weird choice is creating, or using, an app for a web site in the first place.

I don't think that is true. If you run the Nginx web server on Linux for example, with a case sensitive file system, I'm pretty sure that the files you serve will also by default have case sensitive URLs. And probably it'd be the same with Apache on Linux with a case sensitive file system.

What? Case-sensitivity is the presumed default everywhere. I said there is no such problem in a browser, meaning, the url is displayed correctly, not converted to lower case, meaning, the problem is only in the app, and I'm suggesting: "Who needs a phone app for this anyway?"

Ah. I thought you meant that YouTube URLs was the problem. Your comment was pretty vague since both GitHub and YouTube are apps in the browser

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