A Team of Humanoid Game Commentators

Abstract

We present our work on creating a team of two humanoid robot commentators for soccer games of teams of four AIBO robots. The two humanoids stand on the side lines of the field, autonomously observe the game, wirelessly listen to a "game computer controller," and coordinate their announcements with each other. Given the large degree of uncertainty and dynamics of the robot soccer games, we further introduce a "puppet master" system that allows humans to intervene in a sliding autonomy manner, prompting the robots to commentate on an event if undetected. The robots process then input from these three sources, namely own and shared vision, game controller, and occasional puppet master, to recognize events which they translate into a varied set of predefined announcements. We present the behavioral architecture, the vision-based event recognition, and the game-based adaptive criteria for the selection of comments. We exemplify our development with multiple illustrative cases corresponding to different game situations. In summary, our work contributes a team of two humanoids fully executing a challenging observation, modeling, coordination, and reporting tasks.