A Team of Humanoid Game commentators

We present a team of two humanoid robot commentators for AIBO robot soccer games. The two humanoids stand by the side lines of the playing field, autonomously observe the game, wirelessly listen to a "game controller" computer, recognize events, and select announcing actions that may require coordination with each other. Given the large degree of uncertainty and dynamics of the robot soccer games, we further introduce a "Puppet Master" control that allows humans to intervene, prompting the robots to commentate an event if previously undefined or undetected. The robots recognize events based on input from these three sources, namely own and shared vision, game controller, and occasional Puppet Master. We present the two-humanoid behavioral architecture and the vision-based event recognition, including a SIFT-based vision processing algorithm that allows for the detection of multiple similar objects, such as the identical shaped robot players. We introduce the commentating algorithm that probabilistically selects a commentating action from a set of weighted actions corresponding to a detected event. The probabilistic selection uses the game history and updates the action weights to effectively avoid repetition of comments to enable entertainment. Our work, corresponding to a fully implemented system, CMCast, with two QRIO robots, contributes a team of two humanoids fully executing a challenging observation, modeling, coordination, and reporting task.