 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group RoboCup Comes to Melbourne Major Keary |
 |
RoboCup is an international event in which "teams" of legged robots
play soccer. This year will see the annual competition in Melbourne at Interact, which will be held in
conjunction with the PC show in August/September. It will be the first time RoboCup is staged outside the
northern hemisphere. This item is written in the hope that your copy of PC Update arrives before the
show opens.
Preliminary games will be staged at RMIT, and the finals will be played at the PC show. Check the RMIT and
Interact web sites for dates: http://go.to/robocup2000 and http://www.robocup2k.rmit.edu.au/
For information about RoboCup on the Web; try these sites as well as the ones above:
This is an abstract from www.robocup.org's site:
The Robot World Cup Initiative (RoboCup) is an attempt to foster Al and intelligent robotics research by
providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. For this
purpose, RoboCup chose to use a soccer game, and organized RoboCup. In order for a robot team to actually
perform a soccer game, various technologies must be incorporated including:
| design principles of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, robotics, and sensor fusion. |
The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is, by 2050, to
develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in
soccer. Alas, unless blessed with extraordinary longevity I won't be around to see that.
Of special significance is the RoboCup initiative on Search and Rescue for Large Scale Disasters.
Details of a Simulation Project can be found at:
http://robomec.cs.kobe-u.ac.jp/robocup-rescue
Robotic competitions have been around for a while. In 1992 the FIRST Robotics Competition was introduced.
FIRST stands for For Inspiration in Science and Technology; its history and objects are described at
http://www.usfirst.org. The robots are pretty big and have to perform
some heavy duty tasks; for anyone involved in teaching secondary school science there is some interesting
information about how robotics can be used in education.
Another competition, the Botball program, started in 1994. It was established by KIPR (KISS Institute
for Practical Robotics); KISS stands for the familiar "keep it simple, stupid".
The Botball program "challenges students to design, build, and program (in C) a small mobile robot to compete
in a . .. tournament that pits robot against robot in a game of skill, speed, and strategy . . . ".
Reprinted from the September 2000 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
