[HN Gopher] Show HN: Foosbar - My autonomous foosball-playing robot
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Show HN: Foosbar - My autonomous foosball-playing robot
Author : misprit7
Score : 176 points
Date : 2024-06-05 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ano-ther wrote:
| 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.
| mithras wrote:
| I've never seen a table with 3 players in the goalie position
| in my life.
| carimura wrote:
| 3 is tournament play at least in the US if i recall
| cbsks wrote:
| Image search for "foosball table" shows lots of tables with 3
| goalies. The one I played on as a kid had 3 goalies as well.
| tectec wrote:
| The tables I've seen with one goalie have raised corners so
| that the ball doesn't get stuck there. You see it more on
| budget tables in my experience.
| _notreallyme_ wrote:
| Or on official tables according to the International Table
| Soccer Federation.
|
| From what I've seen during my travels, there are lot of
| variations for foosball tables. Each countries seem to have
| their own variations.
| rowborg wrote:
| Official tables can have either style.
|
| There are quite a few tables that are considered tournament
| grade by the various table soccer associations, including
| ITSF (I think at least six manufacturers at this point?).
| In the US, Tornado is the most common tournament table by
| far and has a 3-man goalie bar, but many European tables
| like Bonzini or Garlando have the 1-man and raised corners.
| ano-ther wrote:
| Thanks for all the answers. Perhaps it's a US/Europe thing.
|
| At least the official table of the International Table Soccer
| Federation only has one goalie, and raised corners.
|
| https://www.tablesoccer.org/tables/leonhart.php
|
| Now I need to quickly climb out of this rabbit hole before I
| start to dig into the 41 page rule book.
| https://www.tablesoccer.org/rules/documents/Standard_Matchpl...
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Surprised any federation would have anything other than a
| Bonzini table, honestly it's barely even a game IMHO unless
| you play it on one of those.
| xanthor wrote:
| Tornados are better
| rowborg wrote:
| That's just the Leonhart. There are a number of other
| manufacturers that are approved for various types of
| tournaments including Tornado, which is most common in US
| tournaments and has a 3-man goalie bar.
|
| https://www.tablesoccer.org/tornado
| Projectiboga wrote:
| The single goalie w the corner ramps was a late 1970s into the
| 80s things. Those are now less common as some competive
| foosball uses the three man rear, but there is one or more
| exceptions. I did the researh for my coed fraternity reunion,
| very hard to find the classic ramp tables, as they were made of
| particle board and degrade. The one company w ramps uses a more
| gentle slope rather than an added steep corner ramp.
| weinzierl wrote:
| It's a speciality of the Tornado tables which are mostly used
| in the US. It was introduced as a cost saving measure, because
| four additional figures are cheaper than a curved playing
| surface.
|
| The curved corners in a traditional table are of course
| necessary to avoid the ball being dead in the corners. With
| three players you don't need a curved corner and can still
| always get the ball.
|
| Here is a video of the ITSF world cup, where you can see that
| there is just a single goalie on every side:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3vnrAIOWDwo&pp=ygUOaXRzZiB3b3J...
|
| There is actually a quite interesting documentary out there
| which tells the rise and fall of foosball in the US which is
| tightly coupled with the company behind the Tornado tables if I
| remember correctly. I saw it on Youtube a while a ago, but
| could not find it now. Might have been _" Foosballers"_ but I
| am nit sure.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Obviously, this kid's going places ...
| echan00 wrote:
| yupp
| Bluestein wrote:
| (You know, I humbly accept the downvotes and all, but ...
|
| ... I really meant it in good faith: If he is tackling these
| sort of problems from his bedroom ...
|
| ... what can we expect of him futher down the road?)
| neontomo wrote:
| The ellipsis feels sarcastic btw, if you did not understand
| where the downvotes are coming from.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time.-
| codetrotter wrote:
| 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
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| No such problem in a browser. Perhaps the weird choice is
| creating, or using, an app for a web site in the first place.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I don't think that is true. If you run the Nginx web server
| on Linux for example, with a case sensitive file system, I'm
| pretty sure that the files you serve will also by default
| have case sensitive URLs. And probably it'd be the same with
| Apache on Linux with a case sensitive file system.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Sure, but can it play with French rules?
|
| You'd need quite the robotic arm for repeche.
| nicoco wrote:
| And how does it behave on "gamelles"? Asking the important
| questions in this thread.
| yarekt wrote:
| 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
| jrockway wrote:
| 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.
| frasermarlow wrote:
| He failed to build in an inebriation handicap. How would this
| robot perform after 3 pints?
| Bluestein wrote:
| Inebriation simulation: AI's next frontier.-
| ftkftk wrote:
| My balmer peak was at 1.75 pints and lasted thru the end of 3.
| Then followed by a steep decline. I agree that this would need
| to be modeled in the robot.
| xandrius wrote:
| That was so unbelievably awesome! Even just having the idea to do
| it basically for fun
| echan00 wrote:
| this is simply amazing
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| noman-land wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing but this is only the second
| video on the account.
| pants2 wrote:
| 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.
| besus wrote:
| That sounds a lot more fun than AWS DeepRacer.
|
| +1 - Yes please
| canadiantim wrote:
| pretty dope
| anfractuosity wrote:
| 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.
| smokel wrote:
| _> 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.
|
| [1] https://github.com/misprit7/computerraria
| phlipski wrote:
| I haven't been wowed by a demo like that in years. That was
| awesome!!!
| jalk wrote:
| Stiga Hockey is next
| billehunt wrote:
| So cool.
| ftkftk wrote:
| 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.
| noman-land wrote:
| This is the FAANGest comment ever. I love it.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| 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):
|
| http://science-center.lu/fr/explorations
| fscaramuzza wrote:
| OMG, the French "pissette". Last semester I was there for an
| internship, took me a full week to get used to it. Then there
| was the "rateau", used only by one of my colleagues (the
| strongest) when he was clearly loosing (very rare).
| TwiztidK wrote:
| 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.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| There was a post on HN where someone did positional tracking
| with cheap $5 Playstation Eye cameras and some infrared LEDs,
| so its definitely do-able.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| 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.
| theGeatZhopa wrote:
| Yeah my man! "You've been playing good, no matter what the
| others say"
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrwXZXGiP1w
| theGeatZhopa wrote:
| Extremely cool. WAF is extremely high.
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| 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
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