A 4-legged Dog goalkeeper robot has gone viral online, after making impressive saves and going on to win an online championship.
A research lab at the University of Berkeley recently released footage, of the 4-Legged Goalkeeper Robot hitting off balls from entering the goal post.
It’s part of an exciting scientific field to develop machines that can play sports as well as or even better than human professionals.
In the video, the dog robot handled a range of shots fired and thrown by humans, as well as shots from A1, another quadruped robot created by Chinese firm Unitree Robotics.
To catch the shots, the robot would squat,
The four-legged robot itself is called Mini Cheetah and it is the creation of the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory at MIT.
The robot dog was trained using ‘reinforcement learning’ – a subset of machine learning that allows an AI to learn through trial and error.
This means that the research students would train the robot dog in the laboratory, privately to determine its strengths and weaknesses.
After studying the video, experts said that the robot can save 87.5 percent of shots taken on goal, compared to the average for human keepers of around 69 percent.
Google also showed off the progress of its ping-pong robot arm this week, which recently completed an epic 340-shot rally with a human.
In China, researchers have created a robot called the Robomintoner that can play badminton against human competitors.
The playmate was produced by scientists in Chengdu and unveiled at a tournament in southern China’s Shenzhen City in 2016.