The robotic soccer turing test

One of the long-range objectives of the RoboCup initiative is to develop robotic technology to the point that, within the next fifty years, robots can play soccer at a competitive level against humans. In this paper we first make some comments on the Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, and then advance a proposal for a new kind of experiment to allow machines to compete against humans. We suggest to give human operators the same view of the playing field as that of autonomous robots, to let persons operate a team by driving them, and thus let humans play against a fully automatic robot team. In this way soccer matches of humans against robots could be held in the immediate future and the perceptual capabilities and ability of the autonomous robots could be more adequately assessed. We propose to held a “Robotic Turing Test Challenge” at RoboCup tournaments which would allow us to gauge the state of the art in this field

the soccer robot team of the FU Berlin

This paper describes the hardware and software of the robotic soccer team built at the Freie Universität Berlin which took part in the 1999 RoboCup Championship in Stockholm, Sweden. Our team, the FUFighters, consists of five robots of less than 18 cm horizontal cross-section. Four of the robots have the same mechanical design, while the goalie is slightly different. All the hardware was designed and assembled at the FU Berlin. The paper describes the hierarchical control architecture used to generate the behavior of individual agents and the whole team. Our reactive approach is based on the dual dynamics framework proposed by Jäger, but extended with a third module of sensor readings. Fast changing sensors are aggregated in time to form slowly changing percepts in a temporal resolution hierarchy. We describe the main blocks of the software and their interactions