Great job. Both on your build as well as your entertaining video. Makes me miss the days of in-person working where we spent a LOT of time on the foosball table. To the point where we built an automatic score tracking system complete with dashboards, ELO, seasons, tournament mode, etc. You simply swiped your badge on the table and with a few infrared sensors it kept score and automatically updated your stats as well as the live score feeds. Good times.
I'm really curious how this would've looked if he'd taken a mid-range budget approach to vision instead of being able to throw (tens of?) thousands of dollars of industrial motion capture cameras at it. Something like 2-4 global shutter cameras, all running a similar vision filter to what he first demo'd, feeding a kalman filter/state estimator to determine the ball's position. I can't blame hime for following the mantra of "don't build what you can buy (or get from a sponsor)" but it would be cool to see some affordable solutions (or attempted solutions) to this problem.
What a good idea for a project. CNC-ifying things is quite fun, but at some point you've seen everyone build a 3D printer, CNC router, CNC mill, CNC grinder, etc. from scratch. This is new, though, and I love it.
Obviously, this kid's going places ...
> It has successfully mechanized all my joy out of the game, leaving me free to pursue <a>more important and deeply fulfilling things</a> with my life.
The link [1] then shows us that this person most certainly is on top of their game :) Beautiful write-up and video, and amazing project. Thanks for sharing.
Impressive!
Are there always three players in the goalie position? I seem to remember playing with one goalie (1-2-5-3 players), but that’s a while ago.
This is awesome. I'd love to have this for home practice.
But can the robot shit talk? As a fellow lover of foosball I find that shit talking is ingrained in the culture as demoralizing an opponent (see Community) is a big part of winning at the highest level and should be the next step. I think a committed foosball player might end up creating the first true AGI just for proper shit talking.
Foosball is a tabletop game without general cultural respect (like table tennis does as an olympic sport) or chess, but while robots can easily beat me at chess these days it looks like I'd still be able to beat a state of the art robot foosball table.
The video is very intentionally funny (in a dry way) across the board but owning your younger brother as part of it is hilarious and he was a good sport.
That’s pretty neat.
Is this guys a well known YouTuber or something? He seemed shockingly successful at getting companies to send him really high quality components.
I knew I recognized him! He made a full blown CPU inside a video game called Terraria:
Super impressive!
I'm kind of curious if you could track the ball with two wide angle cameras embedded in each axis of the table. I guess the players could obscure the ball doing that. Although I guess the players are raised a bit from the table, so might work?
I did wonder also if some kind of RF tracking could be used by embedding an RFID tag or similar in the ball.
So good. I had only ever played a couple of games in my life, mostly in a small pub here. I jumped into a game at a tech meetup in London about 15 year ago where I quickly found out that spinning the rod/players isn't allowed, the guy I was playing against got very upset while I was having a great time :D
This is really great. It certainly could become a product. I'm sure plenty of rich, lonely people would love to have a foosball-playing robot. In fact who wouldn't??
Also, this whole thing sounds like a competitor to Stuff Made Here. In a sense this is what Youtube was invented for. Congrats.
That was so unbelievably awesome! Even just having the idea to do it basically for fun
So cool! I played a shitload of foosball / table soccer / kicker / baby (foot). And I lived in different countries / continents and noticed there are so many variants... Some have plastic players, other little wooden players (my favorite). Some have players with flat feet, other with feet that have an angle (it's too easy IMO: way to easy to shot in diagonal: which is doable too with flat feet but requires more skill). There are some where in the corners, so that the ball doesn't get stuck, there's an inclined flat piece of wood, on others it can be a curve (I saw that in Spain / Ibiza a long time ago) then there are some where there's nothing to prevent the ball from getting stuck in a corner.
Then the rules. So many different rules. French rules are probably the weirdest where "pissette" ain't allowed in casual pub games but is allowed in official games.
As a sidenote in a science museum I got to play some foosball vs a robotic arm (which may be of interest to TFA's author) but the robot was cheating in that it could rotate the player to any angle FFS! That was quite cheesy. A little girl can be seen playing it here (8th pic in the slideshow):
There seem to be some sort of tracking dots on top of some of the “players” but that didn’t seem to be mentioned in the video.
Wow, the project is great! What's your next plan about the project?
I haven't been wowed by a demo like that in years. That was awesome!!!
This is such a cool project!! The best kind of Hacker News candy!
I hope it’s not spinning the bar. (I can’t tell from the video.)
Extremely cool. WAF is extremely high.
this is simply amazing
Stiga Hockey is next
He failed to build in an inebriation handicap. How would this robot perform after 3 pints?
So cool.
pretty dope
That’s pretty cool, but I think you’re going to have to build out the other side too to fully remove the human from the equation
Sure, but can it play with French rules?
You'd need quite the robotic arm for repĂŞche.
Off topic comment on my part here but, I’ve never noticed before that GitHub down-cases the display text of the project link at the top. I noticed it now because it’s a YouTube video also linked in the readme, and YouTube video links (and many, perhaps even most, other links) are case sensitive.
Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrwXZXGiP1w
In the top on mobile GitHub renders the text for the link instead as
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrwxzxgip1w
What an utterly weird design choice on the part of GitHub :S
This is extremely cool! I think the next step is to put both sides of the table under robotic control and have an online competition for the best foosball-playing AI. I would tune in every week to see different AIs duke it out.