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Robot Soccer Champions By 2050?
Last January, one of the robot teams for the soccer competition announced that robots would beat humans by the year 2050.
There's been some more news from this group.
It might not be the fastest thing on two legs, but it does already have one very major advantage to over human players, on top of sensorial VisiON's head is to 360-degree vision, meaning that it does not have to turn its head to see in any direction.
Team Osaka, with its human-modeled VisiON robot from Vstone and the Robo Garage at Kyoto University, won several titles in its category, including the "Louis Vuitton Humanoid Cup" for best biped.
Maybe it's just me, but these bipedal robots seemed to have crossed some kind of boundary. I mean, if you start adding some of the "social robot" characteristics to them, like an animated face, it's almost like something out of the movies.
I would give the soccer players 30 years, but 45 is definitely doable. The big problem now, I think, is once you make the robot human-like, how are you going to give it the smarts to act human? This is still a major pain for many computer scientists, but I like the soccer guys approach -- take a human endeavor and work a design around that. They picked a pretty hard thing for robots to do, so when the robots finally win, and they will, it will be a major milestone in our own evolution. The machines already win at chess, they're working on soccer and medicine, what's next?Whatever it is, it will be one less thing that we can claim mastery over. Welcome to the future.
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