Android football team kicks off Science Festival in style

A group of researchers from the University of Edinburgh have created a team of football-playing robots.

Created at the university's School of Informatics, 'Android FC' was showcased as part of the annual International Science Festival.

“RoboCup is a key challenge in robotics research,” said Dr Sethu Vijayakumar, who helped to build the robots.

The three-bot team includes a two-foot tall striker, defender and goalkeeper, each of which are fully autonomous and able to understand their surroundings and respond to other players.

The androids are also able to learn from human demonstrations, representing a step forward from robots who are programmed to robots who learn.

Dr Vijayakumar explains how the key is linking animation techniques like those in Avatar to the creations, “so that it responds like a human being to sound and movement, and has a sense of balance, motion and sensitivity.”

The event, 'The Road to RoboCup', was held in a purpose-built arena in the university's InSpace Gallery on Crichton Street, on 3-4 April.

The contest was the start of the teams preparations for the RoboCup international android football competition in Turkey in 2011.

Founded in 1997, last year's event attracted 407 teams from 43 different countries.

The ultimate goal of the project is to create by 2050 a team that is capable of beating a human club.

The university's research started in autumn last year but as Dr Vijayakumar explains, the results are much further reaching than football.

"It helps focus efforts towards a complete, embedded solution to the problem of sensing, intelligence and dynamic movements in robots and creates a benchmark against which more socially relevant, useful and autonomous robots can be developed," said Dr Vijayakumar.

The InSpace gallery also hosted talks by computer scientists explaining the challenges of creating machines which can mimic people and discussing how robots may be able to detect emotion.