Now in its 18th year, the RoboCup is an annual robotics competition that pairs teams of bots against each other to compete in the game of soccer. As previously discussed in Bits & Pieces, the ultimate goal of the tournament is to develop a robotic humanoid soccer-playing robot by the year 2050. And from the looks of the GIF below, we may be closer than ever before.
In what may be perhaps the most exciting game each year, RoboCup features a robot-on-human matchup to give a sense of what the current state-of-the-art in robotic soccer truly is, and how it stacks up to a team of moderately-talented humans. Sure enough, every once in a while, the robots score a goal on the humans, just as they did this year in the GIF below.
[T]his play was very far from dumb luck: Tech United Eindhoven’s robots made a pass, the striker robot looked at the goal and saw a defender in the way, decided not to shoot, made a pass instead, and the wing robot put it right into the side of the goal. Most of the humans weren’t particularly aggressive, but the defender dude looked like he was actually trying pretty hard there, and he couldn’t stop the attack.
Though this may not be the first time robots have gone on the scoreboard against humans in RoboCup, it is imperative to note that the goals are getting much more impressive because the robots are indeed getting better. So just how close are we before a team of microcontroller-powered creations can defeat a team comprised of flesh-and-blood Beckhams, Messis and Howards? As IEEE Spectrum sees it, these mid-size robots could be potentially defeating a determined team of humans on a small field within the next decade.
Recently here on Bits & Pieces, we covered the RoboCup where a group of inventors and their robots gathered in Brazil to compete in a global soccer tournament. It seems as though the robot invasion into the sports realm is not stopping there. With Tokyo hosting the 2020 Olympic games, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has declared his wish for robots to compete in a similar competition.
“In 2020, I would like to gather all of the world’s robots and aim to hold an Olympics where they compete in technical skills,” Abe noted.
While Abe’s admiration of robotics may be a way to promote Japan’s burgeoning robotics industry, a global robotics competition surely could prove to be a success. As evident with the RoboCup, the event was a massive hit gathering over 550 teams from 45 countries.
To further show the imminent robot takeover, a Korean baseball team recently installed three rows of robotic fans at their stadium. The Hanwha Eagles of Daejeon’s new AI fans could chant and even do the wave, according to BBC. The robot supporters even came equipped with LED screens that had the ability to receive and display text messages from fans.
Are robot fans and athletes just a current technology fad, or are they truly the Michael Jordans and Lionel Messis of the future? Only time will tell!
For when five fingers just aren’t enough, a team of engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a wrist-mounted glove that augments the capabilities of the human hand by adding two extra robotic digits.
“This is a completely intuitive and natural way to move your robotic fingers,” researcher Harry Asada said in an MIT news release. “You do not need to command the robot, but simply move your fingers naturally. Then the robot fingers react and assist your fingers.” The extra grip may be used to hold a container while lifting or stirring it, something which sufferers of arthritis or muscular dystrophy may find helpful. Work yet to be done: miniaturizing the device, and allowing it to to adjust its grip style to the usage patterns of the wearer.
The wrist-mounted device allows for an action such as opening a jar to be conducted with one hand. The next goal for the project is to program the fingers to apply the right amount of force for objects of different weights. This creation would be ideal for those suffering from diseases that sap their strength or limit their dexterity. Asada is hoping to eventually develop a “biomechanical synergy” between the device and the user like “a tool you have been using for a long time, you feel the robot as an extension of your hand.”
In the future, the MIT researchers hope to minimize the size of the device and optimize the device’s wearable nature.
30 years ago, President Ronald Reagan signed Joint Resolution 298 proclaiming that the third Sunday in every July as National Ice Cream Day, giving delicious dessert lovers an excuse to indulge in a cold, creamy treat. To commemorate yesterday’s festivities, we’ve decided to highlight some of our favorite, Maker-inspired creations.
I scream, you scream, we all scream for 3D-printed ice cream!
A trio of MIT students recently created an ice cream 3D printer capable of extruding customized frozen treats using a Solidoodle printer and a Cuisinart soft-serve machine.
“We imagine this technology being marketable in ice cream parlors such as Dairy Queen where customers can order an ice cream treat, wait 15 minutes, and see the shape they chose be created,” the students told 3DPrint.com.
Ice cream that plays music when licked.
Artists Emilie Baltz and Carla Diana explored exactly that idea. Their project entitled “Lickestra” is a musical performance in which ice cream is used as the instrument. The concept was conceived after the pair of Makers began looking into the intersection of design around food and the senses and objects with electronic behaviors. To bring this idea to fruition, 3D-printed cones were embedded with capacitive sensors and perched atop pedestal-like boxes. “Musicians” stood inside the boxes, arms along their sides, and began licking away. When a tongue made contact with the creamy treat, a signal was sent to a hidden Atmel-basedArduino board, assigned a sound by onboard software, and pumped out through speakers.
Cornell University’s Robot Learning Lab recently debuted their latest project called “Tell Me Dave.” Equipped with a 3D camera, the robot scans its environment and identifies the objects in it, while responding to complex commands. Created by doctoral students Dipendra K Misra, Jaeyong Sung, Kevin Lee, and Professor Ashutosh Saxena, watch as the robot fills a rather open-ended ice cream order: “Take some coffee in a cup. Add ice cream of your choice. Finally, add raspberry syrup to the mixture.”
High-tech trend brings back old-fashioned ice cream.
Robyn Sue Fisher, Founder of Smitten Ice Cream, has unveiled a way to give an old-school treat a high-tech, futuristic twist. Through her patented mixing technology, liquid nitrogen instantly freezes ingredients at the very low temperature of negative 321 degrees to provide patrons with a smooth-textured, creamy treat. What’s even ‘cooler’ is that the process doesn’t require traditional stabilizers used in commercial ice cream, and yields much tinier ice crystals than those found in most store-bought ice cream.
RFID provides real-time flavor availability.
A couple of years ago, Izzy’s Ice Cream Café in Minneapolis, Minnesota outfitted their serving freezers and scoopers with embedded RFID technology in order to continuously update patrons with real-time flavor availability. The nameplates for each flavor were equipped with RFID chips, which were then read by an antennae anchored in the dipping cabinet. The inventory was automatatically updated simply through the act of an employee changing flavors in the dipping cabinet. That act triggered an inventory update, which in turn publishes the current flavors to multiple channels, ranging from the in-store screen and website to Twitter and Facebook.
Last Friday (July 18th), Uber served up cold treats on demand throughout 144 cities in 38 countries on 6 continents via an ice cream truck or an uberX car. To order the ice cream, users simply needed to open the Uber app and select an ice cream option. When a vehicle was available, the dessert was delivered in just minutes.
“You’re seeing the same kinds of trends in ice cream that you’re seeing in other foods,” explained Peggy Armstrong, Spokeswoman for the International Dairy Foods Association. “People are willing to experiment.” So we’ve got to wonder: How long before we see an ice cream cone delivering drone?
Troika: A Russian word for a group of three, and also a pretty good Norwegian chocolate bar.
It’s a safe assumption that most of us have had some sort of experience with summer jobs throughout our years as students. It’s also quite likely that some of us remember these jobs as full of sweat and manual work at a construction site, on a farm or in some kind of warehouse; however, not all summer jobs have to be this way. Today, I received a piece of mail from some of the summer interns at Atmel Trondheim, and from the sounds of it, they have some pretty cool things going on!
The Line Follower
A line follower is a machine equipped with some sort of light-sensitive sensors that follows a line — either a black line on a white surface or vica versa.
“This project utilizes two Light Dependent Resistors (LDRs) to detect the amount of reflected light from two Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). The chassis is made of cardboard and the whole robot is made without any soldering. The idea behind this robot was to introduce some intelligence to a robot in an easy and inexpensive way,” explains Magne Normann, one of the summer interns at Atmel.
The Avoidance Robot
This is an obstacle avoidance-type robot based around the Atmel Abot. All that’s required to build this kind of robot is a platform, two motors/servos, some wires and a distance sensor. However, this particular project has got an additional servo. The ultrasonic sensor is mounted on a servo in front of the robot, and as the servo rotates, the sensor measures the distances in its envorionment and uses this information to choose a path between any obstacles.
The Atmel Tank
Have you ever seen one of those USB rocket launchers and wondered if they’re hackable? Well, they are.
“We got our hands on a USB missile launcher, disassembled it, did a reversed engineering and modified it. Then we added Bluetooth connectivity, put it on an Atmel Abot and made an app for it. The app does have both one and two-player modes; one player controls both the vehicle and the turret, and two-player mode where one player controls the car, while another controls the turret,” Magne shares.
“Up until now the only way to interface with an USB rocket launcher had been through the complicated USB protocol. Unfortunately not many microcontrollers support this feature. We therefore decided to hack the rocket launcher down to the old school way, so we could control it with simple GPIOs. We opened the launcher up and discovered the unused footprint for a microcontroller. Apparently, initial design was based on using a microcontroller, but somewhere along the way someone decided to go with a die instead. This left the microcontroller pads unused and available for us to use. All we had to do was probe the signals for each command, disconnect the die from the circuit paths and solder our own wires to the microcontroller pads. This way we could use the existing H-bridges and switches without any additional hardware required.”
Magne notes that the tank is currently bringing havoc to the Atmel department located at Tiller, Norway. Interested in seeing it for yourself? The tank will be on display, along with several other Atmel-based projects, at Maker Faire Trondheim scheduled for August 29-30th. Maker Faire attendees will also have the opportunity to compete for the title of Maker Faire’s “Best Tank Commander.”
Great news for soccer fans: The World Cup won’t be the only event taking Brazil — and the global stage — by storm this month. Kicking off in little over a week, robots from 45 countries will gather in João Pessoa to compete in the international soccer tournament known as RoboCup.
Founded in 1997, RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition aspiring to promote robotics and AI research by offering a publicly appealing, yet formidable challenge. The ultimate goal? To beat the human World Cup champions within the next 35 years.
When robots initially began playing soccer, it was a feat in itself just to have them see the ball, let alone stay upright and kick. Nowadays, these ‘bots are running up and down the field, scoring goals and “sometimes they’re so fast, you can’t even understand what’s going on,” says tournament co-chair Esther Luna Colombini.
The “players,” which range from life-size humanoids to soccer ball-sized wheeled gadgets, compete in size-based divisions on miniature indoor pitches.
According to Forbes writer Jeff Bercovici, the tournament (a perfect blend of athletics and Maker Movement) has matured throughout the years. The inaugural event hosted 38 teams from 11 countries; this year’s tournament will feature 550 teams from more than 45, competing in various divisions.
“You don’t program humans to play soccer,” said Sean Luke, a computer science professor. “We want (robots) to learn how to play soccer the same way humans learn how to play soccer.”
While certainly fun to watch, organizers say the annual competition isn’t just about creating kickin’ machines — it’s about teaching the fully-autonomous robots to make quick, smart decisions while working together in a changing environment.
“Those algorithms can translate off the field into technology like self-driving cars or delivery drones, said University of Pennsylvania engineering professor Dan Lee. RoboCup includes separate contests for service robots and search-and-rescue droids.”
Whether you’re predicting the German or Argentine squad to win this Sunday’s World Cup final, one thing is for certain: The team will be made of flesh and bones, and not powered by microcontrollers. By 2050, that may all change.
After Tim Howard’s incredible, record-breaking performance earlier this month, it makes you wonder if robots have already arrived!
Designed by 19-year-old Maker Jaidyn Edwards, the Arduino-compatible DIY kit claims to differ from other platforms as “she is packed full of personality” – yet only slightly larger than a credit card, making the robot easy to tag along.
One of the prominent features of PopPet is its ability to be customized to suit you. You can easily swap out the look of PopPet with interchangeable faceplates and LED holes.
“Ages young and old love the look of PopPet, just a simple smile can do so much for adding personality to a robot.”
The creator reveals that PopPet will be an open source robot, enabling Makers to create their own faceplates, add-ons, wheels and anything else imagined. For those seeking a wider variety, all the necessary files to produce your own will be provided.
“Not everyone has access to a laser cutter, so there will also be slightly modified files available to fit the tolerances found on most 3D printers,” a PopPet rep explains.
According to its Kickstarter page, PopPet is pre-loaded with a basic obstacle avoidance routine.
Arduino and Atmel have debuted the Zero development board – a simple, elegant and powerful 32-bit extension of the platform originally established by the popular UNO.
“The Zero board expands the Arduino family by providing increased performance to fuel the creativity of the Maker community,” said Massimo Banzi, Arduino co-founder and CEO.
“The flexible feature set enables endless project opportunities for devices and acts as a great educational tool for learning about 32-bit application development.”
The Arduino Zero board also boasts flexible peripherals along with Atmel’s Embedded Debugger (EDBG) – facilitating a full debug interface on the SAMD21 without the need for supplemental hardware.
In addition, EDBG supports a virtual COM port that can be used for device programming and traditional Arduino bootloader functionality.
According to Atmel exec Reza Kazerounian, the Zero board aims to provide creative individuals with the potential to realize truly innovative ideas for smart IoT devices, wearable technology, high-tech automation and robotics.
“Leveraging more than 15 years of experience since the inception of AVR, simplicity and ease-of-use have been at the core of Atmel’s technology,” Kazerounian added.
“[We are] pleased to see the continued growth of the global maker community stemming from the increasing access and availability to open source platforms such as Arduino. We enable Makers, but the power lies within the Makers themselves.”
Interested in checking out an Arduino Zero prototype? You can get up close and personal with the very first prototypes at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 in San Mateo on May 17 and 18 at the following booths:
Mirobot – created by Ben Pirt – is an Atmel-powered (ATmega328 MCU) DIY WiFi robotic kit designed to help children learn about technology and programming.
“It’s fun to build and easy to start programming it to draw shapes. The chassis is laser cut and snaps together quite easily. Mirobot is robust, but also quite simple. Kids can understand how it works and what it does,” Pirt explained in a recent Kickstarter post.
“There’s no slick plastic casing because I think children are more interested in things when they can see what’s going on inside. With Mirobot, the mechanisms are all easily visible – it’s designed to remove the mystery and help understanding.”
Aside from the ATmega328 MCU, key tech specs include:
WiFi module that also acts as an access point
Battery powered with AA batteries
Two stepper motors for control
Self-hosted javascript application to control Mirobot from a web page (no software to install)
Open WebSocket or raw socket JSON-based command protocol
Easily reprogrammable
All unused pins brought out to an easily accessible header
Uses the standard external USB programming connector
Mirobot can be programmed in a number of different ways, including a web-based GUI which is similar to LOGO, albeit with drag and drop.
“Mirobot is a completely open robotics platform – all of the code and designs are open-source so you can modify them to make it do exactly what you want. One of the big benefits of this is that as people make it do new and interesting things, they can be shared with the community to everyone’s benefit,” Pirt added.
“If you want to experiment with the Arduino then you can easily reprogram Mirobot with your own custom code. Want to add some sensors and make it sentient? There’s an expansion port designed for just that.”
Oktopod Studio is an open source development platform for mechatronics, robotics and automation.
The platform – which is powered by Atmel’s ATmega16 micrcontroller (MCU) – allows Makers to more easily create low voltage electronic devices, models and home applications.
“We designed Oktopod Studio to be as user friendly as possible, [as it] features plug-and-play analog outputs, digital inputs, DC and Servo motor drivers [as well as a] graphical user interface for PC and Andriod devices,” an Oktopod rep explained.
“You don’t need to be a programmer or an electronic expert to use Oktopod Studio and make your own robotic projects.”
The Oktopod platform consists of two primary components linked via Bluetooth or USB:
Hardware – Oktopod Board
Software – Oktopod Control App
The Oktopod Board offers Makers a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), along with plug and play inputs and outputs for connecting a wide range of low voltage electronic devices, including LED lights, DC/servo motors, buzzers, electromagnets, switches, as well as photo-, thermo- and magnetic sensors.
