The first autonomous robot football match happened in China and it's like watching drunk toddlers with fewer ethical setbacks
If you're sick of being terrified by the athletic prowess of robots like that displayed from the Boston Dynamics machines, please enjoy these Chinese robots having a red hot go at football. The match pitted four teams of three bots against each other in a classic match, and the results are, well, a little sad. A bit like Boston Dynamics' other video of Atlas failing at parkour. While completely non-terrifying, it does feel like the kind of thing an advanced AI is going to look back on one day and frown at us teasing its early ancestors.
The video above comes from The Guardian, and shows off the Booster Robotics robots toddler level skills at kicking a ball. While the display of these human-shaped machines bobbling around the pitch, struggling to maintain an upright position let alone kick a ball, is entertaining, there's also science to be done here.
Behind the robotic teams in the competition were university teams programming the algorithms. While clearly very limited in movement, the brains of these bots has largely been inputted by these researchers to see whose programming can bring home the cup. Tsinghua University’s THU Robotics ended up victorious thanks to their superior code, beating out China Agricultural University’s Mountain Sea team 5–3 to in the final match.
This kind of programming helps robots learn to do new tasks, and respond to external factors on the fly. It's a bit like an AI powering bots or enemies in a game, determining what moves they can make and how these should be carried out. Just wait til they get these bad bois on a higher difficulty.
Clearly no danger to taking the jobs of human players any time soon, the robots still entertained those watching. “They [THU] did really well,” he said. “But the Mountain Sea team was also impressive. They brought a lot of surprises.” said one fan of the display.
While taking on human players isn't the goal right now, this could become the aim in the future. Founder and CEO of Booster Robotics, Cheng Hao explained that one day we could see bot vs human matches.
“In the future, we may arrange for robots to play football with humans. That means we must ensure the robots are completely safe.” said Cheng Hao.
Right now these competitions are more of a testing ground, not only for the machines but the code used to perpetuate them. Right now we might be watching robots stumble around, falling over trying to kick a ball, but the first step to getting good at anything tends to be kinda sucking at it.