Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Foosball Robots Will Take Over The World

The geeks over at the University Of Freiburg in Germany have created the ultimate Foosball opponent, a machine. Sorta like the Deep Blue of Foosball, the KiRo is constructed of several motors attached to the foosball table rods which are connected to the electronic control system and guided by a camera that continually scans the table surface for ball movement and player position and movement. The computer follows the ball's movement and speed and choses the best possible move based upon the speed, trajectory and position of all the foosball guys in the ball's path.

At this moment the machine has won 85% of its games against casual players, but the nerds at the school are hoping to get that up high enough to bring it on against pro foosball players. Now that I have to see, not the robot against pros, but pro foosball players actually playing foosball.

Here in America, we have our own challenger already for the KiRo and thats the Foosbot by the American geeks at Illinois University -Urbana-Champaign. They claim their machine is completely undefeated, although I doubt that from watching the machine work. Want to watch the devastation that is the foosbot? I thought so, check it below, and turn down the volume unless you wanna hear a crappy nu metal soundtrack:



Foosball man picture by MattRubens
Foosball story by HobbyStop

5 comments:

Loren said...

1. Spinning is for noobs.
2. I'm pretty sure I could beat foosbot. Just judging by that video, it doesn't seem that formidable.

100% Injury Rate said...

I have a foosball table myself. But I worry about the day when foosball robots will rise and kill us all. It's inevitable.

the beet said...

yeah, the goddam machine spins, that is terrible.

i haven't played in several years but i'm fairly positive i could beat that machine using only one arm.

Stephen said...

But can it buy me a soda if I whitewash it?

/Quit spinning, asshole!

Quentin said...

Very cool idea. If they can code it to play trick shots, stop the ball and pass to itself (after the removal of spinning) - that would be really fun to play.

Get some AI in there to capture ball movement trends from the opponent, and set up a defensive strategy for those trends.