Robotic Soccer

        Pittsburgh - According to the Economist robots are coming on stronger.  Half a century is roughly the time that separates ENIAC, America's first electronic computer, from Deep Blue, the IBM machine that beat chess playing grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997.  Now, robots are beginning to do to European football (soccer) what IBM's Deep Blue did to the board game of chess. 
     RoboCup is a competition for robot soccer players, rather than flesh-and-blood ones.  This year RoboCup kicked off on July 19, 2014 in Joao Pessoa, Brazil.  A question that is on many minds is: when will real machines conquer the sport.  Robots do not require a salary and may reduce the annual costs of running a soccer team.  When the first RoboCup was held in 1997, those who launched it set a target of 2050 as the decade engineers would produce a humanoid robot that will rival the champions of that future teams era.  The plodding clumsiness of the RoboCup players is quickly improving.  For instance, self-driving cars and delivery drones, which seemed hopelessly futuristic a decade ago, are now products that businesses may purchase for use now, in 2014.  This years RoboCup had 150 teams.  However, the tournament includes features the organizers hope will accelerate innovation, without the incentive of cash.  For instance, the teams run on very low yearly budgets that are regulated by league rules.  The second rules is a clever combination of competition and co-operation.  Leading up to the playoffs, teams prepare new strategies and fine-tune their hardware and software secrets.  And, immediately after the finals have been played the teams must publish the methods they employed during the competition.  That fills in the gap for something another team might be weak at, and thus the level of learning how to make the robots play, is raised for the entire sport of robotic-soccer.  Thirdly, there are limits to how far teams can push their hardware.  This encourages machinists and engineers to develop smarter ways to win, rather than by using mere brute force.  Fourthly, RoboCup is comprised of several leagues.  These RoboCup leagues range from a little league of miniature cylinders on wheels, like the "Star Wars" character R2-D2, and in which league, the entire team is controlled by one computer using input from overhead cameras to a fully-limbed humanoid league, like R2-D2's companion C-3PO.  In the humanoid league, which is further divided into three sizes of robot - kid, teen, and adult - each android has its own independent on-board sensors and artificial intelligence software.  Also with software, for those robo-jocks who are better at software than hardware, their is a virtual league.  Competition in the virtual league focuses on improving the software needed to program the robots. That software will be used for the fast play style of robotic soccer.  The software will eventually be combined with the hardware - machinery of the robot - to make the robot.  While robots in the humanoid league are still lumbering and prone to error, the speed-and-accuracy of the smaller robots is stunning.  In the little league the robots mechanical accuracy is better, perhaps because they require less power.  Little league robots can kick a ball at speeds of up to 24 feet per second.  They could easily shoot harder were it not for hardware-control regulations that set a maximum speed.  Manuela Veloso helped found RoboCup and her group has won the most final's titles in the little league.  In 2009 Dr. Veloso and her colleagues decided to share with their competitors, the software that had led their team to a win-streak of RoboCups.  See also, www.popularmechanics.com.