I Made the World's Best Foosball Robot! 

The Michael Reeves Stratagem

and hes a little kid, 10 months to him is like 5 years. he'd even put Howard Wolowitz to shame

he probably worked 10 months on this

@@Turalcar That's who I immediately thought of.

Quality not quantity.

If only he could stop using the exact same punch lines as SMH.

Really!

@@impact_42 Hey, at least he only did it once.

I came looking for this comment.

I was about to say this too!

It is until you realize I have 5 cameras menacingly staring at my bed... (albeit not plugged in all the time)

@@built-from-scratchI’m curious if you thought about using some sort of gyroscopic/accelerometer equipped ball instead of the cameras?

I'd like to see another set of motors added to the other side and he can invite other programmers to challenge his programming. Add in more camera angles and hi-speed replays and you've got something.

@@rider573 same thing I thought about - instead of robots killing robots in arena - this gem!

@@BuLLGotcha So we need a ball that's the same size and with a similar surface that's hollow enough to contain an accelerometer and all it's gubbins. It must not be bouncy and must be shock resistant. sounds kinda hard

Can confirm if anyone had doubts about this prestigious honor, that was indeed him.

@@built-from-scratch Did the foosbar ever smack your fingers? XD

nice

Your hand is awesome, thank you so much for gracing us with such beautiful sight.

The hand made the video fr, I'd be otherwise very bored! Gracious sight!

Was this an LLM? It sounded like he wrote the instructions. Was actually gonna ask about using a model lol

Ideally you'd be able to model the game in software so it didn't need to physically play each game for training. It would be interesting to see how well training on a simplistic model translated to playing in the real world. Hopefully well enough to work as pre training, which could be fine tuned with real games. It would speed up the overall training time significantly.

@@JscWilson Human players can currently beat the robot cause they have a better intuition of the real physics. So a NN would definitively need to learn this. A physics simulation would need to be very accurate to do the training in order to be better than the hand written software.

@@salia2897 "Intuition of the real physics" isn’t the only factor. Foosball is dynamic-another critical factor is how quickly a player or robot can receive input, make decisions, and act upon them. As an extreme example, imagine a robot capable of perfect predictions but taking an hour to process them. Another robot with faster reaction times, but less accurate predictions, could score a goal before the slower robot could respond. More accurate predictions are obviously better (all else being equal), but the robot doesn't need to have a better "Intuition of the real physics" to beat a human. That is why I said it would be interesting to see how realistic the model would need to be to be useful. One approach could involve initial training on a simpler and faster model, followed by fine-tuning on a more realistic yet slower model. Such a strategy might outperform dedicating the entire training time solely to the realistic model - but again, the question is how accurate do the models need to be?

@@jessewilson3571 It does not need a better one. But it does need one that is good enough to do the required maneuvers that humans can do. And doing that can only be learned from a physics model that is good enough and that will already be quite complicated.

@@salia2897 With a quick Google search, you can find a number of examples of foosball-playing neural networks that have been trained using simulations. This includes a few public GitHub repositories with Unity models that aren't very complex. So, training on simulations can definitely be done with models that aren't extremely complex.

And many thousands of dollars in sponsors already!

For the third, I didn't need to do much other than manually tune the timings on the snakes. The rotational motors are insanely fast, so even though the sideways motion to start the snake is faster than the average human's, when the ball is hit it has enough forward velocity that it's reasonably straight (hopefully I'm interpreting what you mean by recoil correctly here). This was actually a bit surprising to me; I originally started with the robot doing a push shot which I thought would be a lot more consistent, but it turns out snakes are much easier to get working. For the first lastly, not 100% which device you mean, from what I can tell Foos Gadgets just sells goal spedometers/automatic scoring. Regardless the goal of this project wasn't to be solely a training aid, I really wanted a fully autonomous table so I didn't spend much time on stuff like a practice app. For the last lastly, unfortunately it's probably not possible. I've already disassembled it (I want my room back!) and I'd like to move on to other projects for now. It's not out of the question though, it would be neat!

@@built-from-scratch Wow, I was only HOPING for a response and yet here you are! Yes, you interpreted the recoil I was speaking of correctly - when humans shoot a snake they need to strike the ball while moving in the opposite direction to offset the first rule of motion. From what you are saying, it sounds like your machine does it so fast that it doesn't allow spray, which is insane. It would have been cool to see what it did with a push, I have to recoil my push back to the wall so hard that it practically jars the table. Yeah, I added two "Lastly" paragraphs, sorry. I understand that us foosers probably won't see this at the next World or National Championships but it is impressive and the foos community would love to see it live and get a chance to meet someone who loved the game enough to attempt what you have done. Once again, bravo and keep creating!

Right? It's like a Young Stuff Made Here show

Okay fine you got me, I added this scene last minute and that was all I happened to have on hand. It's not like the power electronics (an H bridge) or the MCU (teensy) were accurate either though

@@built-from-scratch Lol