This exhibit shows technology that enables autonomous humanoid robots, sometimes teams of them, to interact in a fluid and natural way with people. Visitors to this exhibit will see little humanoid robots show off their football moves.
Over the past decade, spectacular advances have been made in
component technologies such as cameras and robot design. The
scientists' focus is now on making robots intelligent in their
social interactions, which requires mathematical and algorithmic
advances in interactive decision making and strategic learning. One
long term goal is to make robots capable of playing games with
primary school children - it is much harder than you might
think!
How it works
Why make computers play games? The answer is that these domains
act as 'test tube' experiments for interactive decision making.
Even simple games can be quite challenging for computers and robots
because they do not immediately have enough contextual information
regarding people's behaviours and way of thinking. They cope by
using models from game theory and learning algorithms that can deal
with incomplete information, such as in our experiment.
One day technology like this may be deployed in the field. It
might be used in fire-fighting or rescue robots, fluidly fitting
into mixed-initiative teams, non-intrusively discussing what needs
to be done with a person who has a lot on their mind already.
Scientists also use experiments like this to study some
fundamental issues regarding human cognition - how do we, boundedly
rational creatures, capture and deal with the infinite richness of
a continually changing world we are interacting with?
Visit the Facebook page of Games robots play.
Games
Play Prisoner's
dilemma or Rock-paper-scissors against two learning algorithms
in this interactive game created by the exhibitors.
Take part in our maze game experiment looking at how we interact
with different environments as bounded rational creatures.
Videos
This video shows the qualifications for entry into RoboCup
2012 and shows selected skills of the robots, with a few
captions explaining what is going on.