skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Motion and Perception
Motion and perception in the field of artificial intelligence has a relatively recent history when compared to other fields in computer science. Along with the premature boom and bust of artificial intelligence in decades past, computer vision and related fields in AI have been slowly developing fundamental methods to have computers be able to sense and analyze its surroundings. Motion is strongly linked with the field of robotics, as the application of this type of research will profoundly impact the way in which we interact with computers, and computers begin to interact with the world. This sub-field of artificial intelligence has a few main parts: robotics, machine perception, computer vision, and speech recognition. Robotics, at its core according to futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, is the study of navigation, localization (knowing where you are), mapping, or learning what is around you, and motion planning, which is figuring out how to get somewhere.
Relevant Link(s):
Ray Kurzweil
RoboCup
“By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team.”
This is the stated goal of the RoboCup project. This project is a loosely associated group of researchers from around the globe, attempting to build a robotic team of soccer players within the first half of the 21st century. This project, since it involves robotics, will use every facet of current motion perception technology. At this point in robot development, creating a Roomba-like robot may not be too difficult to simply shove a soccer ball into the goalie’s net. However this competition is much more ambitious: to create humanoid robots that must adhere to standard soccer rules. Throwing aside the issue of what kind of soccer players would want to risk their legs against a robotic one in a slide tackle, it is an interesting project. Each year a few papers are published exclusively for the purpose of bettering the general knowledge in regards to the subject.
This year’s competition is being held in Atlanta, in early July of 2008. The registered teams for this year’s competition are diverse, including China, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, Japan, and more. In fact it appears that outside of the four-legged and middle-sized competition, the United States is not a major participant in the competitions. This could be due to a variety of factors, none of which I am qualified to speak on. Humorously, in the schedule section of the website for the current competitions, teams get a full “practice day” to help their robots get with the program. See the participation table for schools that are doing research.
Relevant Link: RoboCup
No comments:
Post a Comment