RoboCup 2001 Underway

Dan B writes: "RoboCup 2001, the fifth international competition, is underway. The competition is held from August 2nd through the 10th at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, Washington, USA. International teams compete their autonomous soccer-playing robots in three different leagues including Sony Legged League (remember the cute puppies?). The competition is open to the public, so if you happen to be near Seattle, check it out."

let's hope it doesn't get Battlebot'd

After recalling some of the complaints expressed in last month's article BYO BattleBot [slashdot.org], let's hope this event isn't usurped, commercialized and consequently ruined by Comedy Central.

Though I have to admint, it might be interesting to put a few BattleBots in the stands to give the event the look-and-feel of a soccer riot.

Wow. This could save some $$$s in the UK.

Here in England, professional soccer players often earn in excess of 50000GBP per week. Thats around $75000 a week.

Imagine if we could create a race of perfect robotic soccer players. It could render the human players obsolete.

It would be more entertaining to watch the robot players (especially if they have flamethrowers like on robot wars).

We could change the rules to make it more interesting, and all that money we now spend on inflated wages for soccer players could go to a worthy cause, like helping the homeless, or fighting gun crime in inner city areas.

Oh well, back to building my new PC [adequacy.org]

IJCAI

RoboCup is only one part of IJCAI. [ijcai-01.org] Another interesting event taking place at IJCAI is the AAAI [aaai.org] Mobile Robot Competition [cmu.edu] for urban search and rescue (USAR) robots. They have to navigate three courses developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). [nist.gov] The courses have proved extremely difficult for autonomous robots to navigate.

international. phew

wow, this is a truly international robo-footie series (even if you Americans insist on calling it soccer ;-P )

The way the slashdot article was hyperlinked 'the fifth international competition', I had a sinking feeling it was going to be one of those USA 'World Series' sports which turns out to be 'USA plus a couple of guests'. Good on them for having a reasonable spread of participants.

RoboCup 2001 in the News

Here are some pointers to media reporting on RoboCup 2001 (a few items discuss related events):

"Robo-cup" [npr.org] (audio, requires player) by Lee Gutkind, National Public Radio, Weekend All Things Considered, 28 July 2001

"RoboCup 2001 Marks SGI's Second Year of RoboCup Federation Sponsorship" [prnewswire.com] (press release), PR Newswire, 1 August 2001

"Robot Competitors Meet on a Soccer Field of Dreams" [nytimes.com] (free registration required) by Jeffrey Selingo, New York Times, 2 August 2001

"RoboCup: Where Bots Kick Butt" [lycos.com] by Jason Spingarn-Koff, Lycos News, 2 August 2001

"Rush is on for 'HAL'-like computer to perfect A.I." [nwsource.com] by Winda Benedetti, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 3 August 2001

"Robot world cup kicks off" [bbc.co.uk], BBC, 3 August 2001

"RoboCup 2001 boots up" [nature.com] by Helen Pearson, Nature Science Update, 3 August 2001

"Blutgrätschen ohne Blut und Beine" [stern.de], stern.de, 3 August 2001

"Roboter aus 23 Ländern tragen Fußballweltmeisterschaft aus" [net-business.de], Net-Business Online, 3 August 2001

"RoboCup 2001, il calcio visto dai robot" [punto-informatico.it], Punto Informatico, 3 August 2001

"Building a better goalie (buzz, whir)" [nwsource.com] by Gregory Roberts, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4 August 2001

"Man and machine take the field" [nwsource.com] by David Olsen, Seattle Times, 4 August 2001

"Robots Storm the Soccer Field" [techtv.com] by Maria Godoy, TechTV/Tech Live, 6 August 2001

Information about live Webcast of Botball finals [nasa.gov] (an event distinct from Robocup) on 7-8 August

Other Sports

Wouldnt it be interesting to see some other sports too? Perhaps a decatholon?

Video-feeds?

I searched around on the linked pages to no avail, does anyone know if there are video-feeds from the competitions? I'd be particularly interested in the legged competitions, but any at all would be nice.

Comercialization has destroyed events like these

I remember a time (I feel so old...) when these types of events were held at MIT and CalTech but that was about it; when they were entered by teams of grad students who were all engrosed in the technolohical advancement of the machines.

Now there are TV shows like 'Robot Wars' on Comedy Central, and some similar program on the Learning Channel, which make a mockery of these sorts of events, allowing, entry of remote controlled devices rather than robots, and commented on by outragously dressed characcatures of human beings that you'd evpect to see on 'WWF Smackdown!'.

It's good to see that some of these competitions have remained pure durring this time of rampent commercialization.

--CTH

RoboCop????

I was really excited when I saw the title of the article, because I had mis-read it as "RoboCop 2001 Underway." Imagine my disappointment when I saw it was actually "RoboCup."

I am part man, part machine.

Excuse me, I must go. Somewhere a crime is happening.

where this is heading

According to the New York times article, the intent of this competion is to create a team of robots that can defeat the winners of the world cup for soccer by 2050. It also mentions a bunch of humanitarian uses, such as firefighting and other dangerous work.

But it doesn't mention the most obvious "dangerous work." By which I mean, of course, war. Am I the only person troubled by this?

No Mobile Phones?

Can you imagine the crisis that all the participants and fans are going through? On one hand, they're watching one of the premire tech/geek events in the world, but at the same time, they can't check their email or voicemail.

What to do? What to do?

Woohoo

Great, a whole arena full of generic wedge or box shaped bots completely failing to be entertaining.

Autonomous Robotics

It's slightly off topic, but it bears mentioning here. One of the classes taught at Case Western Reserve deals with building an artificial intelligence that is capable of collecting pastel, plastic eggs and taking them to it's nest, and rejecting black (negative points) eggs (or even better, taking them to the opponent's nest). All of the 'bots are built out of legos. It's a really neat competition too, although I suppose it's hardly of the calibre of making robots that play football. Oh, and just because it's fun to boast, some friends of mine won the competition last year and their 'bot then got a chance to compete against the reigning champion and won!

More info

For those of you who hasn't read the whole story I can tell this is a very international competition. I'm a M.Sc student in Sweden, and at my university here we've had a RoboCup competition for a few years as well. It is a very good way to learn how to write autonome agents (football players), and gives a good insight in how AI "works".

For those of you interrested in trying this at home (yes you can :-) the software is available for download. You can run the "server" on both Unix and Windows. Its just to write a few players and get rockin!
For those who just wants to see how it all works, there are also old teams to download. Go fetch [robocup.org]!

See it if you can!

The goal of this competition is to eventually develop robots and AI that would be capable of competing with a human soccer team. It's a bit scaled down and unrealistic for now, but the machines are getting better every year.

Our team here at Cornell has one the last two international competitions for the small (not AIBO) class robots, in fact, they haven't lost a game yet (although I'm not sure how they're doing right now). Thier team consists of five omnidirectional player robots and one unidirectional (like foozball) goalie robot, all less than one foot in diameter.

The playing field that they use is about one and a half times larger than a ping-pong table, and their class uses a fluorescent orange golf ball for a soccer ball. The players aren't allowed to touch the players on the other team, and none of the robots are permitted to grab the ball (it must remain un-restrained).

A camera is mounted midfield, to give both teams the same video feed. Our entire team is controlled remotely by two computers. One is dedicated to processing the video feed while the other computer does the AI and remote controll of the robots. Unfortunately, they use NT for both because the drivers for their video capture card don't exist yet under Linux.

-- Len