Dr. Prahlad Vadakkepat, Assistant Professor of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the National University of Singapore, explained the procedure of robot soccer match when Zaobao interviewed him.  Dr. Prahlad Vadakkepat is the General Secretary of FIRA at the moment.

“Robots are not controlled directly by humans.  There are cameras installed for each team above the field, which are connected to the computers to enable computers to ‘watch’ the match. Then, based on the strategy program that is already settled, those computers can make decisions on what to play next and, send signals to robots.”

Dr. Prahlad Vadakkepat says the fundamental challenge in robot design is to program good software to endow the robots with the capacity to cope with any unexpected occasions.

So, during programming, the programmer sets the robots what to do under certain situations by “ If ... Then..." commands.  For example, "If the ball is close, then kick it."  But what, exactly, is "close"?  Robots can’t judge themselves.

Fuzzy logic helps robots to judge

Then, it is the time that fuzzy logic is called into play.  Fuzzy logic will help robots to discriminate those blurry zones.  There are networks that mimic the activity of human brain in the software. They help robots to learn from experience, so as to score more goals in the next match.

Dr. Prahlad Vadakkepat says that robot soccer began in 1996, originally in Korea.  At that time, he says, the robots moved very slowly and often halted.  The vision processing was slow too.  It was very hard to achieve a real time control then.

By the development of IT technology, nowadays the hardware of robots and the image processing system have advanced and are now stable.  Now teachers and postgraduate students working in this filed stress their efforts in the development of soccer strategy and cooperation of robots.

Robots often collide with each other

“Still, those robots often collide with each other and even kick the ball into the their own gates’.  These are problems we must tackle. After solving these problems, we can use these robots to carry out other dangerous jobs, such as the regular maintenance of nuclear power plant.”

Looking at those robot soccer players, we can’t help imaging that maybe some day, soccer becomes too dangerous to play, whether those iron players will go to the field instead of human beings?

Future development: robots can ‘think’ by themselves

At present, robots can play soccer depending on the signal transmitted from the computer based on the software programmed in advance.  In the future, they will possibly ‘think’ by themselves.  They will make their own decisions to pass, kick and shoot.

Mr. Wang MingLiang, a master’s student of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the National University of Singapore, when interviewed, said that the immediate challenge in the research on robot soccer players is to develop artificial Intelligence and to impart autonomous navigation capabilities. The objective is to enable robots to adapt to the changes in the environment and to fulfill the appointed operation based on software.

“But, the software is totally written by humans.  We hope that we can develop our robots that can program by themselves.  It is the most challenge side of Artificial Intelligence.”