He turned it into a wrecking ball.
The World Cup competitors better enjoy the spotlight while it lasts — robo-players could soon give them the boot. Video captured the moment a state-of-the-art soccer bot kicked a ball so hard that put a crater in a wall.
The wild clip shows the fun-size Booster T1, which is the flagship creation of the Beijing-based robotics firm Booster Robotics, unleashing a volley of powerful penalty kicks at a goal set up in the company’s lab, Jam Press reported.
After several salvos are stopped by the curtain, one impacts the wall with such force that it leaves a dent as if it was struck by a cannonball.
At one point, the automated footballer kicks one ball straight into the camera, sending it flying through the air.
And the bot’s soccer skills aren’t limited to kicking — the automated athlete also chases down the football, dribbles, passes, shoots and even stands up unassisted after falling down.
No word on if they’ll learn to robo-flop in the future.
Social media users were both impressed and frightened by the droid’s superhuman soccer skills with one gawker exclaiming, “This guy doesn’t hold back – is this even football?”
“I wouldn’t dare go in goal,” declared another.
A third snarked on Reddit, “now all we need is somebody to hack this and make it kick someone in the skull, we’re all set for the dystopian (de)evolution.”
It’s perhaps no surprise that the T1 is such a soccer standout.
Standing at around four feet all and weighing just under 70 pounds, the lightweight and durable ball bot is equipped with force-control sensors from head to toe that maximize its prowess on the pitch.
In fact, T1-powered teams cleaned up at last year’s RoboCup — an all-bot soccer tourney — in Brazil, taking home both silver and gold in the adult division.
The video was released ahead of the next event, which goes down in this year in South Korea.
Of course, robots’ increased power and abilities have raised alarm bells among techsperts, especially in light of the rash of glitches that has plagued our electronic doppelgangers of late.
In the past couple of months alone, a handler in China was kicked in the groin by an advanced Unitree robot he was controlling, and a droid shockingly slapped a child during a dance demo gone awry.
What if, some posited, similar malfunctions occurred around a baby, a hospital patient, or a member of the public during a police interactions?
“The event would be viewed not as comic relief but as a dangerous systems failure,” Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, a tenured associate professor and computer scientist at the University of Louisville, told The Post. “A glitch in a dancing robot is mostly embarrassing. A glitch in a security robot, delivery system, self-driving platform, medical assistant or industrial machine can injure people, damage property or trigger cascading failures.”
