The world's best players may soon be facing a new challenge from football playing robots, which their creators claim will be able to play and beat a human team. According to new research in WIREs Cognitive Science, building robots to play football is driving the development of artificial intelligence and robotic technology which can be used for roles including search and rescue and home help.

The author, Claude Sammut, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems in Sydney, reviewed the technology demonstrated at the RoboCup international robot soccer competition which this year took place in Singapore. Competitions have become a popular way for motivating innovations in robotics and provide teams of scientists with a way of comparing and testing new methods of programming artificial intelligence (AI).

"Football is a useful task for scientists developing robotic artificial intelligence because it requires the robot to perceive its environment, to use its sensors to build a model of that environment and then use that data to reason and take appropriate actions," said Sammut. "On a football pitch that environment is rapidly changing and unpredictable requiring a robot to swiftly perceive, reason, act and interact accordingly."

As with human players football also demands communication and cooperation between robotic players and crucially requires the ability to learn, as teams adjust their tactics to better take on their opponents.
Aside from football the competition also includes leagues for urban search and rescue and robotic home helpers which take place in areas simulating collapsed buildings and residential homes, revealing the multiple use of this technology.

While a football pitch layout is structured and known in advance, a search and rescue environment is highly unstructured and so the competition's rescue arena presents developers with a new set of challenges. On the football pitch the robots are able to localize and orientate themselves by recognising landmarks such as the goal post, yet in a rescue situation such localization is extremely difficult, meaning that the robot has to simultaneously map its environment while reacting and interacting to the surroundings.

In the home help competitions the robot is programmed to recognise appliances and landmarks which will be common in most homes, but in addition to orientating themselves they must react and interact with humans.

As the robotic technology continues to develop the rules of the competitions are altered and made harder to encourage innovation, it is the organisers' aim that this will drive the technology to a level where the football playing robots could challenge a human team.

"In 1968 John McCarthy and Donald Michie made a bet with chess champion David Levy that within 10 years a computer program could beat him," concluded Sammut. "It took a bit longer but eventually such programs came into being. It is in that same spirit of a great challenge that RoboCup aims, by the year 2050, to develop a team of fully autonomous robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team."

So while, for the moment, football players can focus on beating each other to lift silverware, tomorrow they may be facing a very different challenge.

Source: Claude Sammut. Robot soccer. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2010; DOI: 10.1002/wcs.86 and Wiley - Blackwell

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See also: Soccer Robots Are Getting Smarter At RoboCup and Soccer Robots Getting Smarter At RoboCup

Anyone who has ever bravely volunteered to coach a youth soccer team is familiar with the blank stares that ensue when trying to explain the offsides rule. The logic that combines moving players, the position of the ball and the timing of a pass is always a challenge for 10-year-old brains to grasp (let alone 40-year-old brains.) Imagine trying to teach this rule to an inanimate, soccer-playing robot, along with all of the other rules, movements and strategies of the game.

Now researchers have developed an automated method of robot training by observing and copying human behavior.

Why are scientists teaching robots to play soccer? The short-term motivation is to win the annual RoboCup competition, the "World Cup" of robotic development. International teams build real robots that go head to head with no human control during the game. This year's competition is in Graz, Austria in June.

Here's the final match from the 2008 RoboCup:

The long-term goal is to develop the underlying technologies to build more practical robots, including an offshoot called RoboCup Rescue that develops disaster search and rescue robotics.

In a study released in the March 2009 online edition of Expert Systems with Applications, titled "Programming Robosoccer agents by modeling human behavior", a team from Carlos III University of Madrid used a technique known as machine-learning to teach a software agent several low-level basic reactions to visual stimuli. "The objective of this research is to program a player, currently a virtual one, by observing the actions of a person playing in the simulated RoboCup league," said Ricardo Aler, lead author of the study.

In addition to actual robots, RoboCup also has a simulation software league that is more like a video game. In the study, human players were presented with simple game situations and were given a limited set of actions they could take. Their responses were recorded and used to program a "clone" agent with many if-then scenarios based on the human's behavior. By automating this learning process, the agent can build its own knowledge collection by observing many different game scenarios.

The team has seen early success at learning rudimentary actions like moving towards the ball and choosing when to shoot, but the goal is to advance to higher-level cognition, including the dreaded offsides rule. Implanting the physical robots with this knowledge set will give them a richer set of actions to choose from when they are exposed to visual stimuli from the playing field.

Previous attempts at machine learning relied on the robot/software to learn rules and reactions entirely on their own, similar to neural networks. Aler's team hopes to jump start the process by seeding the knowledge base with human players’ choices. While current video soccer games like FIFA 2009 already use a detailed simulation engine, transferring this to the physical world of robots is the key to future research.

RoboCup organizers are not shy about their ultimate tournament in the year 2050. According to their website, "By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, comply with the official rules of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup."

That's right; they plan on the robots beating the current, human World Cup champions. "It's like what happened with the Deep Blue computer when it managed to beat Kasparov at chess in 1997," says Aler.

Maybe they can also build a robot linesman who can always get the offsides call correct!