Technology Innovation

If you are a soccer fan and you watched the European soccer championship you would believe that soccer is a game only for human beings. But thats not true " even robots are playing soccer and they also have their tournaments. During this years Hanover fair there was the RoboCup German Open robot soccer tournament organized by the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems. In this tournament different groups of robots were playing soccer. One group was defined as humanoids with two legs. And there is even a robot soccer world cup which will take place this year from July 13 through July 20 in Suzhou, China.
You might say thats just a funny application but more or less useless. But playing soccer is a great challenge for robots and indicates the development from simple machines dedicated for one single job like welding robots in automotive production to more intelligent applications. The term robot is generally defined as "an autonomous or semi-autonomous machine that is able to take inputs from sensors and react in a reliable way to do its job". Which doesnt say anything about the kind of robot. It can be a multi-jointed arm robot in a factory, a service robot cleaning homes and serving drinks, as well as unmanned vehicles.
The first robot generation which youll find mainly in manufacturing is relatively simple and performs the same job permanently. The advantage is the exact repeatable, reliable, and faultless work of a robot " compared with human workers. Furthermore robots dont become tired. The second generation are programmable robots which performs their different tasks when necessary. Examples are the house keeping robots which are able to vacuum the carpet, sweep, wash, pick up toys, feed the cat, clean the litter box, and perform half a dozen additional functions. But therefore the intelligence of the "brain" of the machines has to be increased by orders of magnitude.
And now back to the soccer playing robots. Playing soccer means that the robot has to recognise different and ever-chancing situations in its environment and despite do its job properly. This is a great challenge for the sensors and actors as well as the data processing. Furthermore the robot should learn by itself what leads to artificial Intelligence (AI). Examples of this kind of third generation robots are unmanned vehicles which drive or fly independently without a driver or pilot. It is expected that 33% of Army vehicles in the USA will be robotically controlled by 2015 and civilian vehicles will follow this path in a relatively short time after that.
Another trend in robot technology is the development of humanoid robots. One example of this kind of robot is Reem B developed by Pal Technology, a company located in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. This robot is able to converse with humans, walk dynamically, recognise and grasp objects, accept voice commands, and remind humans of appointments. Manufacturers of plastic are already working on "skin" for robots which has a look-and-feel like human skin and makes the machine human-like. If this trend continues maybe we will end up in the far future in a situation were "colleague" robot in the factory or in the office is a perfect copy of a human being like the androids in Steven Spielbergs film AI and we all will be surrounded by them

Source: http://robotics.youngester.com/2008/07/our-future-with-robots.html