RoboCup provides a venue for researchers to showcase their achievements in developing complex robotic products. But the ultimate objective is to field a team of autonomous robots to play against the human world soccer champions by the year 2050 and, of course, to win the match.
With approximately 2,500 participants, the competition was made up of more than 400 registered teams representing 36 countries from around the globe. To help mitigate a little of the pain suffered by the United States in the World Cup, the team fielded by Carnegie Mellon University won the small-robot competition.
Aside from winning the RoboCup competition, Carnegie Mellon also provided an important service on the sidelines by delivering the play-by-play commentary during the event. Admittedly, it can t be too difficult to call the action on the field, especially for relatively slow-moving robots, but Carnegie Mellon's announcers weren't humans they were two four-legged robots.
The 2 -foot tall robots, named Ami and Sango, were developed by Sony Corporation and programmed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon. The announcer-robots can track the ball, know which team has possession, and move their heads and bodies to be aligned with the action on the field. Using synthesized speech, the robots announce when a player-robot kicks or passes the ball, how fast the ball was moving, and even when a goal is scored.
Not completely on their own, the announcer-robots receive wireless inputs from a controller such as calls made by the referee on the field. When an event such as a goal is scored, the robots are programmed to respond accordingly. One might dance around with arms waving about while the other shouts out an appropriate comment.
Each robot calls the plays on only half of the playing field because of its limited vision range. However, they are programmed not to talk simultaneously or repeat one another. If one robot sees an event on his side of the field while the other robot is talking, the first robot can interrupt and the other will stop speaking.
All I can say is today's sportscasters had better watch out. In the future, these mechanical marvels will be able to handle many more announcing duties, all completely autonomously. Not only will they accurately call the action on the field, but they instantly can provide, from sophisticated onboard computers, additional commentary on a variety of topics including in-depth individual player statistics and intricate rules of the game. Human announcers quite possibly will become extinct when the new robocasters take over.