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Hardware Hacking Robotics Build Games Technology

Engineering Students Build Robotic Foosball Players 59

Posted by Soulskill from the taking-over-the-world-one-table-at-a-time dept.
Andre writes "As their final-year project, an eight-man team of fourth-year electrical and computer-engineering students at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, constructed a robot-controlled, motor-and-actuator foosball table capable of playing against human opponents in a two-on-two fashion; one mechanical player controls two defensive rods (goalies and full-backs) and the other controls two offensive rods (half-backs and forwards). They considered the computers 'medium-skilled' players in that they were very competitive against beginners and fairly competitive against intermediates."
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Engineering Students Build Robotic Foosball Players More

Engineering Students Build Robotic Foosball Players

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  • Not that easy, it would appear (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bearhouse ( 1034238 ) on Saturday April 04, 2009 @09:38AM (#27457063)

    FTA: 'After a year of software development and testing, the team and faculty consultant Sebastion Fischmeister demoed their bionic foosball superstars in January 2009 at the university's Senior Design Symposium to a positive reception.'

    Guess Beckham et al. are safe for a while...

  • Easy and done before in Austria (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I don't understand why this is a /. story.

    This has been done before by an Austrian University?

    http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Tischfussball-Roboter-aus-Oberoesterreich--/meldung/135390

    (German)

    • and a model designed at the University of Freiburg is commercially available since ~ 2002...

      • sorry, I was wrong.

        the development started in 2001, the cooperation with the company was signed in 2003 and introduction of the "Star Kick" was as late as 2005.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Link, for completeness' sake:

        http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~kiro/english/index.html

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pthisis ( 27352 )

      Yes, and the "intermediate" tag is wrong.

      They're okay against bar hacks. Against even an average rookie-level tournament player, both systems get totally smoked.

      His "anyone with a fast pull shot" includes bottom-tier players from local city tournament, let alone anyone with a shot of breaking even in amateur events on tour.

      It'd be like saying a computer chess program is "intermediate" because it does okay against the average joe off the street, when even a poor tournament player beats it easily. Or like s

  • What if? (Score:3, Funny)

    by conureman ( 748753 ) on Saturday April 04, 2009 @09:56AM (#27457155)

    I wonder how the "players" would do if they had their positions switched. Would the algorithms want re-writing?

  • That didn't take long at all.

  • Medium Skill? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Shanrak ( 1037504 ) on Saturday April 04, 2009 @10:16AM (#27457271)
    From TFA: "Despite this," he admits, "anyone with a fast pull shot usually sneaks it past, so more improvements on the reaction-time front are definitely necessary before the computers are ready for the big leagues." There will always be strategies players can use against computers in games like these, too difficult for the programmers to think of every possibility ahead of time. Beating the system does not take skill, but simply finding an exploit. Example from Starcraft: early on, send a single drone to attack their base, the computer will immediately send all their resource gatherers to attack your single drone, thus stopping his advancement. Repeat until you have an army to kill the computer. Cheesy, but even a novice SC player can beat the AI that way.
  • I for one welcome our new foosball playing, robotic overlords.

  • So.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jfinke ( 68409 )
    They came up with a hardhack version of pong?

  • Build a robotic bully which will go back to our high school and beat up all those mean kids who took our lunch money!

  • I remember reading about a robot called TriKiTrain at a college in Austria a while ago.

    http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Tischfussball-Roboter-aus-Oberoesterreich--/meldung/135390 [heise.de]

    Of course, it's in German. I didn't find any english articles on it, but google translator might help.

  • This is great. Now we no longer need to take the time needed to engage in amusement activities and we can concentrate on more important things, like tetherball. And to all those people worried about fun loss, more people will be needed to repair the robots that play the games, which is even more fun!

  • One of the more interesting aspects is that a different group engineered the defense from the offense.

    Human sports are often decomposable in similar fashions. A team may have separate coaches for attacking and defending, but more generally a sport could have a complete separation of roles. Instead of two teams each responsible for both offense and defense, a game could involve four teams in two pairs. Award points to the defenders according to saves.

    This would be trivial in sports like baseball and Ameri

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That would actually make things incredibly boring. One of the aspects that makes football (soccer) interesting is the fluid definitions of roles. A good defender, especially the full backs, will play an important role in attack. Similarly, the midfielders are expected to defend. By setting up teams constrained to one role, you go back to the football of the beginning of last century.

  • 'Full-back' refers to a wide defensive player in football - the second row on a foosball table features two full-backs and two centre-backs, and should be referred to as 'defence'. 'Half-back' refers to a position which isn't even used in football these days - the third row on a foosball table is simply 'midfield'.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 )
      Bzzt...wrong, buddy. He's using the terms correctly. Take your cultural blinders off and try to see things from a perspective other than your own, for once.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by 117 ( 1013655 )
        Care to elaborate on that, maybe give me a hint as to what's wrong? You say "for once" as if we've gone down this path before, however I remember no previous incident.

    • the second row on a foosball table features two full-backs and two centre-backs

      That might be true in the most common formation on a real football pitch. But a table football isn't real football. There is no row of four players, just look at the photos. Epic fail!

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by 117 ( 1013655 )
        Fair comment, although 'Epic fail!' is a little harsh, I got the numbers wrong, but the point is still the same.
  • For the Brits here, Foosball is table football. No idea why it's called that over there. Maybe from the German, Fußball?

    • Re:Foosball? (Score:4, Informative)

      by $lashdot ( 472358 ) on Saturday April 04, 2009 @11:43AM (#27457859) Journal

      For the Brits here, Foosball is table football. No idea why it's called that over there. Maybe from the German, Fußball?

      "Foosball" does come from the German word. The game increased in popularity in the USA in the wake of WWII, although the first American patent dates to 1901. One helpful article to read is http://www.foosball.com/learn/knowledge/chp1hist.html [foosball.com] from the book The Complete Book Of Foosball (Lott & Brainard, 1980)

      I've never heard an exact explanation for why Foosball (or just Foos) specifically caught on as a name. Maybe "table soccer" is just too awkward. Obviously, Americans couldn't call it "table football," since football is a different sport there.

  • This video is being hosted on the discovery channel and they have two stories before the robotic foosball player

    http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/daily-planet/february-2009/daily-planet-february-3-2009/#clip136425 [discoverychannel.ca]
    • Too bad there's so much "let's shake the camera all around and do a bunch of rapid scene changes with weird angles so we're hip and cool" going on that you can't actually see anything.

  • Call me when your puny machine can play the king of all arcade games, USA vs USSR bubble hockey.

  • This just in... robotic cars (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is an old concept- hardly newsworthy.

    I played against a table like this at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in 2003.

    There are even sites with instructions to build your own: http://www.instructables.com/id/Autonomous-Foosball-Table/

  • Some fellow students of mine built this project years ago at Georgia Tech for their senior design project. I believe they only had 4 people working on it as well. The final product functioned well, and reacted quickly.

    My group built a fully automated electro-mechanical chess board (nothing new here either). Any other cool projects out there?
    • Not only that, but it seems this isn't the first mechanical foosball table built at the University of Waterloo. Back in 2003, my fiance saw the demo of a laser-guided foosball table made by some fourth-year engineers. So either this is built upon work done by past students, or is reinventing the foosball-playing wheel. It'd be nice if their website [uwaterloo.ca] acknowledged it either which way.
  • That's not a Tornado! What kinda crap are they trying to pull??
  • How exactly is this news? A German student did this in 2001 for his MS thesis [uni-freiburg.de], and the robot has been commercially available since 2003 from one of the larger German gambling machine vendors [merkur-starkick.de] (site in German, but has photos and videos of the commercial version).
  • not an easy job to develop a robot...really admire their efforts.
  • Here is a link to some foosball robot videos http://www.foosball.com/forum/index.php?topic=1389.0 [foosball.com]
  • I remembered someone had build the same thing back in 2002, in RoboCup 2002 conference and competitions in Fukuoka - Japan.

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