Learning a Table Soccer Robot a New Action Sequence by Observing and Imitating

Star-Kick is a commercially available and fully automatic table soccer (foosball) robot, which plays table soccer games against human players on a competitive level. One of our research goals is to learn this table soccer robot skillful actions similar to a human player based on a moderate number of trials. Two independent learning algorithms are employed for learning a new lock and slide-kick action sequence by observing the performed actions and imitating the relative actions of a human player. The experiments with Star-Kick show that an effective action sequence can be learned in approximately 20 trials.