soccer

Soccer players are a weird bunch. Some cover themselves in Elvish tattoos, while others claim to have problems telling men and women apart. Hajime 33 is no exception to the trend, what with him being a giant robot and all.

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In the recent Robocup 2009 games, in which robots compete for prizes and glory, entrants from many nations held their own. In categories including small, medium, humanoid, 2-D simulation, and 3-D simulation, teams from the U.S., China, Germany, Iran, and quite a few other robot-producing countries played and won.

However, on the smallest playing field of all, there was one clear winner.

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Tired of missing your favorite sports because you're stuck in a meeting? Those woes may soon be a thing of the past. A team of researchers at Umeå University and Ericsson Research in Sweden have developed a technology synchronizing a cell phone's vibrations to a ball's movement in a field. The vibrotactile tool is designed so that a phone vibrates at different frequencies and lengths depending on where the ball is on the field, which team is kicking the ball and when a goal is being scored. A ball in midfield, for example, produces a light, short vibration, while a ball that makes it past a goalkeeper sets off a stronger and longer vibration meant to signify "Goooooooooooooal!"

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For a video of the soccer-playing bots in action, click here (WMV Format).

As World Cup soccer rages in Germany this month, 350 teams from around the world will convene in the city of Bremen to compete in the robotic equivalent, the 10th annual RoboCup World Championship. The goal, so to speak, of this event is highly ambitious: to create android athletes that could whip the human world-champion soccer team by the year 2050and, along the way, advance the field of artificial intelligence.

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