It's not new for the machines to beat humans in the games humans designed; the latest one being the Foosball. Students studying at Automatic Control Laboratory have designed a Foosball playing robot that beats humans easily & quickly. The Foosball table pictured below looks ordinary game table; but it's not. In fact, it's been conquered by the machine built by the students as a part of their academic project. The machine can control the mechanical arms and 'kick' the ball at 6 m/s - quite fast to beat any average Foosball player. Christophe Salzmann, the head of the project, says that their creation would eventually prove to be more accurate, faster and 'strategic' than any player.


The machine uses a high-speed camera to accurately determine the position of the ball at any moment in time. A computer then adjusts the mechanical arm to make the moves. The bottom of the table is made transparent so that the high-speed camera can track the ball in real time. Image processing algorithms ensure that they know where the ball is and then direct the mechanical arms to correct positions. The team has not achieved the perfection they're aiming for yet, but their work is in progress.

The ultimate goal of the project is to have two robots playing against each other. We bet that'd be an interesting game to watch. What say you?

Source: A Robot to Beat Humans at Foosball - EPFL