Since everyone is so gung ho about the World Cup these days, I figured I’d bring a little flavor in what I write about regarding Pittsburgh. Carnegie Mellon University does indeed have a soccer team, however it’s not quite what you’d expect!
The CMDragons are actually going to be joining the ranks of competing teams from all across the world in an upcoming soccer tournament. However these guy’s are quite different, with all of them ranging from 6 inches in height and all of them have very slow and robotic movement!
The CMDragons, a team of five wheeled robots standing less than 6 inches tall in the shape of cylinders, will look to claim its third championship in five years competing against opponents from such countries as Brazil, Iran and Thailand at the world’s largest robotics and artificial intelligence event.
“I expect to finish first,” team leader and Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Manuela Veloso said. “I don’t see any reason why we won’t win.”
Dr. Veloso and the rest of the Carnegie Mellon team are expecting an algorithm developed for computer science student Stefan Zickler’s Ph.D. thesis to give the CMDragons the edge at RoboCup.
It’s just completely awesome, that we have that kind of knowledge to be able to do this in the first place. So not only are these group of robots storied champions, they are one step closer to adapting and finishing real live situations for themselves.
nstead of the team’s old strategy of planning a set of plays for the robots to execute — like American football — Mr. Zickler created an algorithm based on the principles of physics that allows the robots to analyze situations, evaluate the different options available to them and pick the best one. The robot’s decision-making process happens at a speed of 60Hz — or 60 times a second. The result is a considerable amount of ingenuity on the robots’ part.”The robot, in its mind, essentially, during the game, is predicting ‘What would happen if I were to do this?’ ‘What would happen if I were to do that?’ and then comes up with new strategies on the spot,” he said. “We’re not writing [code telling the robot what to do] anymore."
Dr. Veloso did not think any other teams will be using a similar algorithm since she has yet to see papers published on the topic.
Not that all of this high tech sporting didn't come without any issues. Had they team not suffered a fatal glitch last year, they would have won. However it didn't work that way:
The CMDragons used a preliminary version of the algorithm during last year's competition and easily defeated most teams before a meltdown in the tournament quarterfinals.
"We had a pretty horrible glitch last year where our robots became blind," Mr. Zickler said. "We would crash into [our opponents] a lot because we didn't see them, and the referee gave out yellow cards until we only had the goalie left on the field. A minute before the end of the game, the other team finally eventually scored on us. And that was just with us having a single goalie."
All in all, they will also be fielding a team of 22inch tall robots, who move a little bit slower but fundamentally play the same. To read more on this awesome story head over to here: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10165/1065452-298.stm
Check out this sweet video too!
Mon, Jun 14, 2010
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