Berlin (dpa) – The camera whirred and the little robot swung towards the small
red ball, using its infra-red sensors to judge the distance to the goal. Then
it started to run, triggered its shoot mechanism and kicked the ball into the
back of the net.
This robotic soccer game may just look like recreation for scientists, but it
has serious implications for researchers, says Raul Rojas, professor of
artificial intelligence at the Free University of Berlin.
“Football is an easy game for humans to play, but it is quite a different
matter for robots. They are faced with numerous problems that they have to
solve all at once,” he said.
The annual RoboCup, the soccer world cup for robots, was founded in 1997. Teams
from university departments all over the world compete in various robot
leagues. In the simulation league, computer programmes only compete against
each other.
In the small robots league, automatons not more than 18 centimetres wide
compete against each other, while in the medium- sized league they may be up to
50 centimetres in diameter.
The Berlin robotics team plays in the small league – with great success. The
cubic figures on two wheels were runners up in the RoboCup in Stockholm last
year.
But the researchers are also making great progress in other areas of robotics,
especially in developing service robots. “We develop, among other things,
computer-guided software for an office messenger robot,” said Michael Beetz of
the informatics department at Bonn University.
“The challenge is to get the robots to make independent decisions on their
rounds.” If there is a change to its previously programmed tour, such as
finding a door it thought was locked is open, it has to consider if it can use
this chance to speed up his rounds, said Beetz.
Some of the robots are already active outside the laboratory. “Cleaning robots
already polish the floor at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam,” said Christoph
Schaeffer of the Institute of Production Technology and Automatisation (IPA) at
the Fraunhofer Society in Stuttgart. The institute was one of the teams
involved in developing the robot cleaners.
The experts in Stuttgart also developed the robots that greet visitors to the
Museum of Communication in Berlin. “The first is the museum guide who runs
around telling the story of the museum, the second is responsible for greeting
guests, which he does in 15 different ways,” said Schaeffer. The third and
smallest robot plays with a ball and was developed for children. When children
have the ball, the robot follows them.
“The three robots also communicate with each other,” said Schaeffer. If the
little one loses its ball and cannot recover it after two minutes, the other
two comfort him and ask visitors to give him his ball back.
“It is a very good way of breaking down museum visitors fear of robots and
showing them they are just ‘people’ like you and me,” he said.
