Topic: Robotic foosball players designed by university students

[RichardV]

I came across the following article about a group of eight Canadian university students who made their final-year project a robotic foosball table:

I, Foosball Player

http://www.canadianmanufacturing.com/designengineering/features/motioncontrol/article.jsp?content=20090403_120621_9732

The article gets technical in places, but the images are nice. Have you ever seen a project like this before? My favorite quote, regarding the computer players' skills:

Overall, Nadeau said he would call the computers "medium skilled" players in that they were very competitive against beginners and fairly competitive against intermediates, blocking and returning many shots. “Despite this,” he admits, “anyone with a fast pull shot usually sneaks it past, so more improvements on the reaction-time front are definitely necessary before the computers are ready for the big leagues.”

[Daniel]

Here is link to other foosball robots.

http://www.foosball.com/forum/index.php?topic=1389.0