The era of flesh and blood athletes could begin to have competition with robots like the one created by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the Dribblebot that is characterized by standing on its four legs -unlike the more traditional bipeds – and have great agility controlling and dribbling with the ball.
‘Soccer’, as they call it in the United States, is one of the best sports to test a robot’s locomotion, agility and decision-making, something that has been tested since 1996 with the RoboCup, the great international sports robotics competition founded in 1996.
From MIT they recognize that “the robot does not have the ability of Lionel Messi”, but that it has “an impressive dribbling system” and that it can even “dribble a soccer ball in the same conditions as humans”. With these features, without a doubt the Dribblebot is one of the most advanced devices in history in this regard.
To achieve this, the robot uses a combination of sensors and onboard computing to run across different natural terrains, including sand, gravel, mud and snow, and adapt to its varying impact on the ball’s movement. Like Messi himself, Dribblebot can get up and recover the ball after a fall.
MIT researchers have been working on programming robots to play soccer for a long time, but this time the development team wanted to focus much more on Dribblebot automatically learning to operate its legs during dribbling to discover skills that are difficult to program on pitches very diverse and complicated.
From thousands of simulations that take into account the robot, the ball and the terrain, all the physical parameters are established, and from there the contraption is launched in real life, comparing and collecting data 4,000 times faster than with a single robot.
Project co-director Yandong Ji admits that “the movement is also designed to be more static; the robot does not try to run and manipulate the ball simultaneously”, although the latest advances have allowed “improving locomotion outdoors to this compound task that combines aspects of locomotion and dexterous manipulation at the same time”.
The entire project has broader applications, beyond the world of soccer robots. The debate about the effectiveness of robots with legs is still open, but the truth is that there are still clear limitations to how far you can go on wheels.
“Today, most robots have wheels. But let’s imagine that there is a catastrophe, a flood or an earthquake, and we want robots to help humans in the search and rescue process. We need machines to navigate terrain that is not flat, and wheeled robots cannot traverse those landscapes,” says Pulkit Agrawal, a professor at MIT.
Proof of this is that the cute little Dribblebot continues to have limitations despite being focused on his agility: stairs and slopes continue to be a challenge for him. The next step will be to improve his ability to avoid these types of obstacles and thus become a benchmark for the ball.