Bots on Centre Court?

Robot sporting events could become more common in the coming years. But how many of us will be tuning in to watch?

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Researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland recently taught the one-armed, four-legged ANYmal search and rescue robot to play badminton against a human.

Fans of the sport may be relieved to learn that ANYmal’s skills are unlikely to oust humans from the court any time soon, but training the robot to track and strike the shuttlecock was a complex task and the results are impressive.

“We used methods like reinforcement learning, which is basically where you improve the behaviour of the robot through trial and error,” explains the lead roboticist on the project, Dr Yuntao Ma.

“For badminton, perception is one challenge, agile control is another, and the third is to coordinate these two factors,” he says.

This is far from the first time robots have been trained to play sports. They've performed dance numbers and gymnastics routines, run marathons and skied, played ping pong and learned to juggle. There’s even a football RoboCup.

IT’S NOT ALL FUN AND GAMES

“Sports require skill,” says Dr Raffaello D'Andrea, a professor at ETH Zurich who specialises in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). “If you want to create robots that have dexterity or the ability to cope with the physical environment, you can use sports as a proxy for learning those tasks.”