Building a World (Robo)Cup football team in Vaasa

AI researchers trying to develop a team of autonomous footballing robots that could defeat the humans in 2050

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By Timo Paukku
     
      Finland’s quarter-final placing in the 1998 World Cup is not good enough for the coach who has arrived in Vaasa. Nadir Ould Khessal, who makes his home in Singapore and Canada, wants to see Finland in the finals in Osaka, Japan in 2005.
      Khessal doesn’t actually have a team as yet. He is building - and the choice of verb is deliberate - his squad of six players in Vaasa over the winter, with a team of engineers. Engineers, yes, because that 1998 competition, held in Paris while the real World Cup was going on, was for the "Soccer Simulator League", and because the 2005 entry will be in the "F180 Robot League".
      The Vaasans' national squad will not be made of flesh and blood, but wires, microchips, sensors, and plastic mouldings. Then the "players" will be programmed to play as a team.
     
By next spring, the boys of the Botnia Robocup Team should be match-fit. The squad will then seek entry to the World Cup in the F180 (robots no larger than 18 cm across) series, and their fortunes will initially depend on getting through the qualifying round of a video presentation of their skills on and off the ball.
      Robofootball is increasing in popularity at a dizzying pace. The 2004 Robocup in Portugal had 346 teams taking part and 1,600 devices battling for the ball. There are numerous different categories, from four-legged Aibo dog robots to full-sized humanoids. In Fukuoka two years earlier, the robots were watched by a total of 135,000 spectators.
     
Finland’s best performance to date remains the 8th spot secured by the Samba team from Oulu University’s Intelligent Systems Group, in the football simulation category in 1998.
      Nadir Ould Khessal presented the preliminary line-up and tactics of his robot footballers at a seminar arranged by the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society and held at the beginning of the month in the Heureka Science Centre in Vantaa.
      The Robocup may look like just big boys playing with electrical toys, but the aims are lofty. Robocup is a testbed for practically all the world’s laboratories working on AI issues.
      The visiting lecturer Khessal and his group at the Vaasa Polytechnic’s Information Technology Department are therefore carrying forward the development of sensors, hardware and software for computer vision, and the autonomous interplay between machines. Or as Robocup itself puts it: "design principles of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning and planning, intelligent robotics, sensor-fusion, and behavior learning".
     
The university, company or country that comes up with the goods on this is going to have no shortage of people beating a path to its door. And the country that develops a smart solution to artificial intelligence need not worry too much about the job-drain threat of the "China or India syndromes".
      Robocup also spills over into homes. Not all mobile robots chase after a small orange ball. Some, for instance, are trained to find dirt and dust. Autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners already bustle around in many households, even if they are still a very expensive consumer durable indeed.
      The robo-Hoover is bound during the current century to be joined by dozens of other little helpers, whose applications have often been developed in connection with the Robocup tournaments.
      Industry has used computer vision, shape recognition, and other sensor properties for a good long time now, for instance on production lines to separate out nuts from bolts or flawed products from perfect ones ready for sale.
     
In the seven years since the first Robocup (held in Nagoya in 1997 in conjunction with an international conference on AI), the robots have developed a definite eye for the ball. Khessal shows a video of how the robots blundered around in Japan back then. They look like Finland could have given them a good game.
      That first tournament year, 1997, will go down in AI and robotics history as a watershed. It was the same year when IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer took on the reigning World Chess Champion Garri Kasparov in a rematch. The machine won the six-match series, 3 1/2 to 2 1/2. A line had been crossed.
      Things have moved on apace: robots are now practising their passing technique. The player can also be primed to switch roles in mid-game.
     
The robot players, resembling oversized pen-holders, are alive. Well, almost. The team has the air of a flock of city pigeons that has suddenly wised up to the idea of using groupwork in preying on the last scraps of a human’s meat-pie.
      Sometimes the dice-shaped players freeze in place as a statuesque defensive line. Three of the players just sit there, because the orange ball has not been cleared into their area. They look like they are recharging their batteries in the middle of the match.
      When they wake into life, the scene is hilarious. Many of the programmers on the touchline fall about laughing as they watch their charges. Robocup offers - or at least it did in its early stages - some glorious moments of slapstick comedy.
     
The Robocup competition rules are strict, but there is always a temptation to slip a little devious gamesmanship in between the circuit boards.
      The programmers at Cornell University in the United States developed omnidirectional drive systems and a controversial "dribbling bar" for the robot "foot" last year, which pulled the ball in close to the side of the device. The ball is thus glued to the player's frame just as tightly as it was to Diego Maradona’s foot (or hand) in the 1980s.
      Cheating, as plain as day, some would say. It remains to be seen how long the Cornell boys will be able to get away with it, but they have in any event won several Robocup titles since 1999, and are among the elite teams in the small-sized robots category.
     
Reaching the Robocup finals is no easier than qualifying for the FIFA World Cup in Germany in 2006. Last year, 60 teams applied and 24 were accepted in the middle-size category (mid-sized robots with all sensors onboard, playing on a field of 12 x 8 metres), says Khessal, a Robocup veteran.
      The equivalent of the Olympic A-standard for qualifying is to first write an article on how the team was created and the AI techniques employed. As elsewhere in academic circles, the makers must be published in a scientifically-acceptable journal or periodical. The organisers will also want to see a video in which the team plays a demonstration match, just to see things really work.
      Even so, games at Robocup are often rather one-sided, and thrilling 4-4 draws are a rarity.
     
Khessal points out that in the tournament the robots really are independent creatures. They have a common aim, however: to take the ball that they recognise by infra-red signals towards the opposition’s goal.
      Researchers describe this clever-looking behaviour as "swarm intelligence", akin to that shown in a group of insects or a school of fish. This is the latest rage in artificial intelligence, and means that the robots really are greater than the sum of their parts - just like in a normal two-legged football team.
      The swarm receives commands from its central memory at 64 millisecond intervals: attack - defend - follow - block - find a route to goal.
     
The rapid development of Robocup soccer  does suggest that a team of androids could indeed take on a squad of humans on the stadium turf in 2050, as the Robocup organisation has semi-seriously targeted.
      The World Cup Finals in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in the summer of 2050 could perhaps kick off with an exhibition game of Robots XI vs. Humans XI, if we have not by then got to the stage where it is acceptable to have Robotica vs. Brazil in the final itself, playing for gold.
      For this "Match of the Millennium", the robots will of course have been programmed to "play nicely". Their circuits and wires would be coated in a soft fleshy material, and all the tackles would be within the rules of the game.
      Fifty years ago, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov laid down the ground-rules for robotics programming. Humans must be served by their androids, and they cannot be allowed to harm us.
      But on the other hand, can we stop them beating us with a swerving free-kick in extra time?
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 7.9.2004

More on this subject:
 Japan and the humanising of the robots

Links:
  Robocup (contains rules, categories, and pictures of tournaments)
  Robocup 2005, Osaka, Japan
  Botnia Robocup Team (competing in the F180 league, with 18-cm robots and a golf ball)
  Nadir Ould Khessal
  Robocup German Open 2004 (has some good pictures of this and earlier tournaments)
  Ulm Sparrows, one of the teams in the main photo
  Philips Robocup Team, winners of the mid-sized Robocup German Open in 2003

TIMO PAUKKU / Helsingin Sanomat
timo.paukku@hs.fi