A Team of Nao Robots Play a Game of Soccer During the AI for Good Global Summit

At this year’s AI for Good Global Summit, a team of football-playing Nao Robots kicked, passed, and kept track of a soccer ball on a miniature artificial soccer pitch. A group of students from the University of ETH Zurich developed these Nao Robots that jostled around and kept attendees entertained.

“The project allows our undergraduate and graduate students to collect experience on a full robotic platform,” Jan-Nico Zaech, the project’s scientific supervisor, said. The Nao Robots were certainly a sight to see and became proof of how important teaching robotics is to students. As such, it was good to showcase the work of these students in a prestigious event such as the AI for Good Global Summit.

Organizers of the summit held in Geneva also showed ways in which technology could improve and transform lives. “…AI can be embedded in so many more things in every life… Whether it’s for flood forecasting, disaster management, and early-warning systems, in agriculture, or in health. It’s across the board,” said Tomas Lamanauskas, Deputy Secretary-General of the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

With that, other displays in the summit consist of prosthetic robotic limbs that adapt using AI, and robot pets, such as robot cats and robot dogs, that can serve as companions for the visually impaired.

Overall, this summit showed just how pivotal AI is in transforming the future of robotics. With this technology, the application and uses of robots can definitely broaden up, and more importantly, advance in a way that further helps humans and our society.