Foul 2050: thoughts on physical interaction in human-robot soccer

Abstract

Abstract-The RoboCup community has one definite goal: winning against the human world soccer champion team by the year 2050 [1]. This implies real tackles and fouls between humans and robots and rises safety concerns for the robots and even more important for the human players. Nowadays, similar questions are discussed in the field of physical humanrobot interaction (pHRI), but mainly in the context of industrial and service robotics applications.Our paper is an attempt for a pHRI view on human-robot soccer. Technically, this will be years ahead, but still we believe it is enlighting to analyze the RoboCup vision from the perspective of pHRI. We take scenes from the 2006 FIFA World Cup as examples and discuss what could have happened if one of the teams consisted of robots instead of humans.

(A) VISION FOR 2050 - The Road Towards Image Understanding for a Human-Robot Soccer Match

“…This is an impressive result, but still more than five times slower than the top speed of a human soccer player. A similar gap regarding kicking velocity has been pointed out by Haddadin et al (2007). They showed that a state-of-the-art robot arm (with a configuration comparable to a human leg) is six times slower than required to accelerate a standard soccer ball to an adequate velocity.…”

“…artificial muscles, will be needed. Since soccer is a contact sport leading to physical human-robot interaction (Haddadin et al, 2007), not only direct position control but also approaches for compliant motion, such as impedence control, need to be taken into account. Additionally, the problems of energy efficency and power supply need to be solved.…”

Kick it with elasticity: Safety and performance in human–robot soccer

“…Although being designed as an arm, it has inertial and geometric properties comparable to a human leg ( [11,24]. So we use it as a "model" for the leg of a future humanoid soccer robot throughout, while not claiming that the design is feasible for a leg in general.…”

“…4) and discuss their injury potential for the human and the robot. The discussion is based on a recent paper [24]. There we have analyzed scenes from the FIFA world championship 2006 in detail pretending that one of the players was a robot.…”

“…[9]. Current humanoid robots are less heavy but also smaller than the average soccer player [24]. The injury potential for a human being clamped on the ground by a robot that outweighs him is apparent.…”