Injury, lack of energy and individuality rather than
teamwork have led to England coming last in an international
football tournament for robots.
Competing in tournaments is part of a research area which has
wide-ranging implications, according to England team manager and
BCS member Paul Robinson, a principal lecturer in robotics and
automation at Plymouth University.
"Robot football integrates three strategically important
technologies: artificial intelligence, real-time vision recognition
and microrobotics," he said.
Robinson said Plymouth University is the acknowledged UK leader in
this area. His team has taken part in the Robot Football World Cup
in 1998 and 2002 and numerous other national and international
tournaments.
Its greatest success was the 1999 defeat of Austria, then the
reigning European champion by a convincing 12-2 score line. The
match was played in Germany and featured on German TV.
The team was sponsored by the BCS for the European cup competition
in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where England came last in both the
three-a-side and five-a-side tournaments, with their best result a
5-6 defeat by France.
The England team was hit by problems from the start of the
tournament. It soon found the robots' battery capacity was too
small. "Each game lasts 10 minutes, but stoppages take games to 45
minutes and the batteries are exhausted after one and a half
games," Robinson said. "After a couple of days the batteries could
no longer be fully charged for all the robots before a game. In one
game the robots stopped in the second half, leaving the opposing
team free to score."
A PC captures images from a camera mounted over the centre of the
pitch. The robots, each no bigger than 75 cubic millimetres, are
controlled by the PC via a radio. An orange golf ball is used and
the tops of the robots are coloured so the PC can track them via
the camera. The whole system is entirely autonomous.
The robots are often not robust enough and tend to fail after
collisions. The England team lacked a ball scoop, so the robots
could not dribble. The strategy software also needs to be developed
as the robots are controlled individually rather than as a
team.
These and other issues including radio communication and noise on
the images also affected the team's performance.
The England team is the only team that builds its own inexpensive,
modular robot footballers. Most other countries buy their players
from specialist suppliers.
Robinson's team hopes that many of these problems will be overcome
in time for the 2003 World Cup in Vienna from 28 September to 3
October.
Researchers are still some way from their ultimate goal of
developing robot teams that can compete successfully against
humans. A target date for this is 2050.
Robinson's full report on the European tournament and on robot
football research is at
www.bcs.org/ebulletin/030806/football