Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), working under a grant from DARPA, are putting humans riding Segway scooters and robots built on Segway bases on the same soccer team in the hope to encourage the kind of cooperation that leads to understanding between the both. Technology Research News has the story.
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.
This promises to translate to any application that requires multiple robots to work with people in real-time, said Veloso. Examples are autonomous robot vehicles sharing the roadway with human-driven vehicles, robot building construction crews, search and rescue operations, and space exploration. These tasks all require real-time decision-making and action, she said.
The preliminary set of Segway soccer rules calls for human players to carry devices that allow them to communicate with the robotic players. The players will use a size five soccer ball, but for safety's sake, dribbling is not allowed, only passing. And to encourage human-robot interaction, the sequence of passes leading to a goal will include at least one robot and one human. The game will be played on a soccer field proportional to a standard soccer field, but scaled depending on the number of players.
So, this is the theory. Let's look at some images (Credit: CMU).
 
But don't expect such robots in a near future.
Robots designed for specific applications could become practical in 5 to 10 years. Robots that interact with other robots and humans in general applications will take longer -- at least 20 years, said Veloso.
You can find more information about this project on this page. And more images are available from this one.
Sources: Eric Smalley and Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News, December 31, 2003/January 7, 2004
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