The 4 Stooges robot team aim to kick butt

By ELLEN READ

The French soccer team had better watch out. Plans are afoot to create a team of fully autonomous soccer-playing robots capable of beating a human world champion soccer team.

That may sound far-fetched, but at the 2001 World RoboCup Games - a soccer world cup for robots - which kick off in the United States this week, examples of progress will be on display.

University of Auckland computer science and electrical engineering senior lecturer Jacky Baltes and three students left yesterday bound for the Seattle games with their 4 Stooges team of robotic soccer players.

Not quite on the human-size scale, the 4 Stooges are made from toy cars and measure roughly 18cm in diameter.

"It's a showcase for current state of the art robotics research and robotics system," Dr Baltes said.

His 4 Stooges team will compete in the small-sized league where up to five robots a side play on a table- tennis-sized table with an orange golf ball.

The rules are kept as close as possible to the original FIFA rules, meaning yellow cards, red cards and penalty kicks are all part of the game.

Most of the other teams' robots cost around $US20,000 ($48,600) each. The 4 Stooges cost $US300 each - "because we basically just use toy cars. We go to the toy store and buy some toy cars and then modify them so we can control them from the computer," Dr Baltes said.

Those computers - which are outside the playing field - are usually controlled by remote.

This year, however, the 4 Stooges is one of the first teams in the world to have a computer and a camera on each robot - meaning they can function autonomously.

The robots are programmed to talk to each other on the field - once the game has started humans are not allowed to intervene from the sidelines.

While the competition will be keenly fought, Dr Baltes is more interested in the research side of the gathering.

"Eventually we hope we can apply this technology for urban search and rescue robots," he said.

The games run from Friday until Saturday week, and Dr Baltes believes their biggest competition will come from Japan's Omni team.

Links

RoboCup 2001