January 11, 2004
Playing Robot Soccer
Over at Carnegie-Mellon, they have a project with humans on segways and segbot playing soccer in mixed human-robot teams. In order to home in on the right kind of interactions that are required for humans and robots to interact, these kinds of experiments are invaluable.
Posted by elkaim at January 11, 2004 9:32 PM
The researchers have made a human-size version of their soccer-playing robots by basing the robots on Segway scooters, and they are working on a set of rules for Segway soccer, a game designed to be played by mixed teams of the robots and humans riding Segways.
The project is designed to allow researchers to look at human-robot interactions in which humans and robots are on nearly equal footing, said Manuela Veloso, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. The two types of players will have nearly the same acceleration, the same top speed, the same turning abilities, and will use the same ball manipulation device, she said.
The setup makes it possible to explore questions like how and when humans and robot should communicate, and how they should divide a common task, said Veloso. "There are many really interesting challenges here that we now have the opportunity of investigating," she said.