- Researchers from MIT designed "DribbleBot," a robot that dribbles a soccer ball just like humans.
- The robot stands out for its ability to kick a ball with legs, while most robots still use wheels.
First came Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Mini Cheetah Robot. Now, meet "DribbleBot," a four-legged, soccer-playing robot.
Researchers from MIT's Improbable Artificial Intelligence Laboratory designed the robotic system, which can dribble a soccer ball across a range of surfaces.
The DribbleBot can also track a soccer ball as a human dribbles it nearby and even take over if the ball crosses its path, as shown in a YouTube video.
"If you look around today, most robots are wheeled," said Pulkit Agrawal, an MIT professor and the director of Improbable AI Lab. "But imagine that there's a disaster scenario, flooding, or an earthquake, and we want robots to aid humans in the search-and-rescue process. We need the machines to go over terrains that aren't flat, and wheeled robots can't traverse those landscapes."
While the robot's soccer skills aren't at "Lionel Messi-like level," the researchers said, the robot is able to dribble a ball across sand, gravel, mud, and snow. The robot can get up from a fall and push on with dribbling.
This latest bot from MIT is fashioned with sensors so the robot can detect when it's crossing snow versus gravel, and a camera sits on top of the robot's head so it can locate the soccer ball.
Similar robots have come out of MIT, including various iterations of MIT's back-flip-performing cheetah robot from 2019. Four-legged robots designed by other companies, including Boston Dynamics, Ghost Robotics, and Anybotics, are also putting their robot-iterations to work, such as performing equipment inspection checks at companies.
Robots and soccer may seem at first like an unlikely pairing. But the technological pursuit goes back decades.
In 1992, Canadian professor Alan Mackworth ruminated on the idea in his paper "On Seeing Robots." Shortly after, RoboCup, an annual international robotics competition, emerged in 1997. The competition set out to inspire creators to build a robotics-soccer team that could compete — and win — against a human World Cup championship team, according to RoboCup's website.
Although people involved in the RoboCup world have floated around a hope of achieving this goal by 2050, right now the technology is nowhere close to meeting this goal. But advancements like MIT's show there's still progress being made toward the dream of competitive soccer robots.