It remains to be seen whether robots will rise up against humans. But they could end up fielding a better football team than us sooner than anyone was expecting. For now, football-playing robots have not replaced any real players, but we don’t know what will happen in the future… Recently, we heard about ARTEMIS, one of the robots developed to compete in the RoboCup. Today Dribblebot is on the agenda.
The new MIT-designed robot dog Dribblebot can dribble a football ball on any terrain
The robot, whose name is Dribblebot, has the physique of a 4-legged dog. With its legs, it can roll the ball with its front legs while balancing with its hind legs. It has also been trained on difficult grounds. In this way, it can walk through mud, grass, and sand. So why did we turn from wheeled robots to legged robots?
“The whole point of studying legged robots is to go terrains outside the reach of current robotic systems,” Professor Pulkit Agrawal, the director of the Improbably AI Lab, said in a statement. “Our goal in developing algorithms for legged robots is to provide autonomy in challenging and complex terrains that are currently beyond the reach of robotic systems.”
In addition to the above, the only purpose of developing legged robots is of course not only a team that will beat a human team in RoboCup. In addition, one of the important reasons is to reach places that cannot be entered in search and rescue operations. This is difficult to achieve with wheeled robots. The makers of Dribblebot had this to say about this robot:
“Past approaches simplify the dribbling problem, making a modeling assumption of flat, hard ground,” project co-lead Yandong Ji said in a post tied to the news. “The motion is also designed to be more static; the robot isn’t trying to run and manipulate the ball simultaneously. That’s where more difficult dynamics enter the control problem. We tackled this by extending recent advances that have enabled better outdoor locomotion into this compound task which combines aspects of locomotion and dexterous manipulation together.”
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