KICKING a football should be child鈥檚 play, but it took a Pittsburgh company nine months and $400 000 to create a robot that can kick like a pro. Robo-Kicker puts the Alan Shearers of this world to shame: it can take penalty kicks every 15 seconds, all day long. The robot is on its way to Herzogenaurach, Germany, where Adidas will use it to test football boots and balls.
Bally Design鈥檚 engineers worked with scientists from Carnegie Mellon University鈥檚 Field Robotics Center in Pittsburgh, including Hagen Schempf 鈥� the only member of the team who had ever played soccer. 鈥淚 was drafted in to demonstrate various styles of kicks, while the others videotaped my movements,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e also analysed videos of pros kicking, and consulted anatomy texts.鈥� They found that the player鈥檚 torso first rotates to get into kicking position, then the upper leg is brought forward and upwards from the hip, and finally the lower leg is snapped forward from the knee while the foot is held rigidly in position relative to the ankle.
鈥淲e soon realised that we could not simulate a human kick with standard power components such as electric motors or hydraulic systems,鈥� Schempf explains. 鈥淭o deliver the massive acceleration in the final quarter-second before impact we would have had to make a monster weighing several tonnes.鈥� Instead the robot relies on small electric motors to load the necessary potential energy into spring-powered actuators. Clutches release this energy at the right moment.
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