Humanoid Robot Visits Year 5 Students

This term, Tom Zhang (Alex’s Dad in 5OCO) visited students in Years 6 and 6, and he showed us a robot that he had been working on with his company, which is called, Booster Robotics.

We were fortunate to see a robot that the company has been working on recently. They hope for it to play against human soccer players in the future. It has also won the World Robotics Soccer Cup. They used a special method of training the robot called ‘machine learning’, where it simulates it in a virtual world millions of times, so it learns it lots of times in a second.

It was a bit shorter than the average height of a child, with 4 cameras for eyes that gave it the best depth perception. The way he gave it commands was through a small tablet that had all the code inputted in it. The person controlling it would press a button, and it would try to kick a soccer ball. It would keep on trying until the person controlling it pressed the stop button on the tablet.

A couple of the things it can do are the Michael Jackson dance, it can kick a ball well and track it, and it can stand up from its stomach or its back. The company is inputting new modules to allow it to do things like a backflip, a front flip, and do karate.

Tom talked to us about neurons in the brain and showed us a picture of human brain neurons, a robot’s central wiring, and a nuclear explosion and surprisingly, they looked quite similar. Overall, it was an amazing experience, and I am so glad we got to have it.

Sadie Marks
5SHA