Introduction to Getting Beat By Robots: The Future of Sports?

June 05, 2006 | Post Archive

Robot Golf

Robots, robots everywhere—making cars, greeting tourists…playing rounds of golf. Don't get too excited (or worried for that matter), you won’t soon find pairs of humanoids on Pebble Beach (and please, spare us the jokes about lawyers--yes, they’re really people, too). Last weekend in Catania, Italy, amateur roboticists and robot fans alike gathered from around the globe for this year's annual Eurobot competition.

In this year's competition, pairs of robots competed against one another on the golf course. But theirs wasn't a true golf course; it more closely resembled a bordered tennis court with color-coded holes punched in it. Teams of two robots worked together to sink the colored [table tennis] balls they’ve been assigned. But there's a twist: not only did they lost points for getting balls in the wrong holes, there were black balls on the court the robots could use to keep their opponents from getting points. Hey, didn’t American Gladiators have something like that?

If scientists get robot technology where they want it, can you imagine what it would be like to golf against an android? They'd be the ones on the course you'd love to hate--the perfect chip shot, a perfectly-calculated short game. But then again, there's always the chance they could be programmed to only get bogeys. Heck, program them for double bogeys. We'll all feel better for it.

Eurobot 2006 features 120 robots that represent 128 different countries. You can follow the competition on the Eurobot 2006 live blog.

Robot Soccer

RoboCup is on a serious mission. Visit the RoboCup official site and you’ll be presented with a lofty goal: "By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team."

A humanoid robot kicks a ball.

(AP Photo/The RoboCup Federation, HO)

RoboCup is the robot version of the World Cup and the [self-proclaimed] "most important robot contest in the world." This year’s RoboCup, scheduled for June 14 to 18, will coincide with the FIFA World Cup and be held in Bremen, Germany. The event will host 400 teams from 36 countries—a total of 2,500 people, the organizers estimate. RoboCup has six different classifications for robots, which include small-sized, middle-sized, four-legged robots and humanoids.

Soccer may be the name of the game, but the purpose is to advance research in the field of artificial intelligence. The organization chose soccer because it uniquely tests how human a humanoid really is. It requires developers to use a broad range of technologies and figure out how to put them together into a cohesive, working whole. I told you the goal is lofty. But given recent advances in robotics, and a scope of more than 40 years, you never know what might happen.