Before Atlas the humanoid robot entered the pitch to hand the ball to the referee during Norway’s World Cup match against Brazil on Sunday, it demonstrated its football skills on the sidelines.
At the end of the break, Atlas emerged from the players’ tunnel and repeated a series of epic goal celebrations before the ball was exchanged. But it seems that the robot was shy, because it can actually do more.
In a series of videos published on YouTube, Boston Dynamics shows how it trained a humanoid robot to perform several soccer tricks, including its version of the rabona — a difficult move in which the kicking leg crosses behind the standing leg to hit the ball — that the company calls the ghost rabona.
When I met the latest version of the Atlas at CES back in January, I had no idea that this summer it would be able to make moves worthy of the World Cup. But I shouldn’t have taken it for granted — after all, this robot, and many others like it, are designed to learn new things all the time.
These robots will be used first in industry before moving into service and entertainment settings, and eventually into our homes. That’s still a long way off, but learning what they do along the way is essential to getting there.
For now, it’s important for Boston Dynamics to share Atlas’ skills with the world — and not just for entertainment purposes, said the company’s director of robotics behavior Alberto Rodriguez.
“It is the duty of the community to show that technology reaches a certain level,” he said.
Not only does it spark debate on how this technology will fit into society, but it also raises public awareness of how close we are to humanoid robots becoming mainstream.
Preparing for the Atlas World Cup
I’m curious why, of all the things Atlas learned, Boston Dynamics wanted to teach a robot soccer skills.
“We’ve always found inspiration in physical activity or extremes,” Rodriguez said. “It inspires us to squeeze more functionality that we know is possible into the robots we build.”
Training Atlas to get ready for the World Cup started by using motion capture to record the movements and skills Boston Dynamics wanted the robot to perform. This was then put into simulations, and “through a lot of trial and error,” Atlas then learned to mimic these steps as much as possible within its physical constraints, Rodriguez explained.
There were two levels to the robot’s abilities, he adds. The first part of this involved the robotic limbic system — balance and coordination, agility and movement. It was necessary to develop lightning-fast muscle memory, which is also necessary for sports performance in the fields of dance or gymnastics.
The second level was more difficult, going beyond athletics. It involved the robot’s manipulation of objects and its ability to use the right amount of energy to interact with the world around it.
Teaching Atlas to automatically adapt to collisions and slippage, as well as to accurately determine how close it is to the ball, pushed the robot out of its comfort zone. It was more difficult to model than say a backflip, Rodriguez said. “All of that is in the air, where the dynamics are much better understood and much easier to represent in simulations.”
The atlas may not boast an exact resemblance to the anatomy of the human body, but it was designed in such a way that it was able to replicate the human “fluidity and energy”. But that doesn’t mean his football education was without growing pains.
In Boston Dynamics’ School of Football video series, it’s clear that Atlas has taken a lot of fall in its approach to teaching skills. It’s especially challenging to teach Atlas athletic skills because that process inevitably involves contorting his body into positions that put him at risk of a “catastrophic fall,” Rodriguez said.
Despite this, breakdowns and repairs are all part of training robots, and there is a “well-oiled process” for repairing them, he adds. By the time we see them — walking out onto the football field, for example — we’re less likely to see them fall.
“When we use robots, they tend to do things that have been well tested, and we are sure that they will not get into bad situations,” said Rodriguez.
When will Atlas start playing professional football?
Atlas is already smarter than most of us athletic, hard-boned humans when it comes to soccer, but I asked Rodriguez if there were any skills he wished Atlas could learn he couldn’t teach the robot during the World Cup.
“Kicking the ball is not difficult to learn, and we definitely did that,” he said. “But kicking it really well is hard to do.” He talked about how famous footballers like David Beckham and Roberto Carlos were able to bend the ball the way they intended.
“That’s the kind of thing that you probably have to end up learning through practice in the real world. That’s just a lot harder to learn through acting,” he said. “Maybe you should learn by trial and error with a real soccer ball.”
Will Atlas join the group in 2030?
Fortunately, Atlas has four more years to learn the skill before the next World Cup. Should we expect that during the 2030 tournament, Atlas may have been hired by one of the teams?
Despite its developing soccer skills, it’s unlikely we’ll see humanoid robots playing on humanoid teams, Rodriguez said. The most likely to see teams of robots playing against each other.
Robots can move in ways that human players can’t — rotating their joints or turning their limbs, allowing them to turn without taking any steps, for example. This won’t make them better players, but it will undoubtedly change the way the game is played in a way that can be difficult for a mixed team of robots and humans to navigate.
In the meantime, Atlas has learned a lot from its entry into the world of football. Its new footwork, precision and speed may not see it taking home a World Cup trophy anytime soon, but the robot has reached its peak overall.
“Forcing ourselves to go through that behavior had the indirect effect of improving, in general, how Atlas works,” Rodriguez said.