10th Annual RoboCup

Aryabhata writes "As soccer fever continues the 10th RoboCup also got to a start. 400 teams fight it out in 11 different leagues including onces designed for humanoid to four legged robots. "The organizers of the tournament hope that in 2050 the winners of the RoboCup will be able to beat the human World Cup champions".
Beyond the novelty value, the cup enables 2,500 experts in artificial intelligence and robot engineering to meet and test their latest ideas. The championships is followed by a 2 day conference where the teams can dissect their play and work."

Press release for Sango and Ami

[technoextreme]

http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060608_robocup.ht ml [cmu.edu] The competition is not just about robots preforming soccer. There are two other events that are completely unrelated to soccer. One event is search and rescue and the newest competition involves domestic applications. PS. This is probably the only time I will ever watch a soccer event.

Re:2050

[Anonymous Coward]

Robots already have a degree of self awareness. Position sensors, battery charge monitors, etc are all designed to let a robot know about itself in relation to the world. As we develop more sophisticated robots, they will require a greater degree of self awareness. Right now, industrial robots are basically programmed at the "goto position x1,y1,z1; close gripper; goto position x2,y2,z2; release gripper;" level. If you want them to work at the "Pick up part X from conveyor belt; dip part in solvent tank;" level, the robot is going to have to be able to coordinate vision and arm motion. In other words it will have to have a greater degree of self awareness. When you get into higher level stuff (same robot, multiple tasks) the robot will have to keep track of which tool it has, what loads it is capable of manipulating, etc.

In short, the more self aware the robot, the higher the level of abstraction you get in assigning tasks to it.

For the 10000th time,

[Ireneo Funes]

It's called FOOTBALL.

robocup 2006 home page

[martyb]

The BEEB's blurb was interesting, but here is a link to the RoboCup 2006 home page [robocup2006.org]

There are pics, background, schedules, leagues, etc.

It's over already

[SmilingBoy]

"As soccer fever continues the 10th RoboCup also got to a start."

It got to a start four days ago and finished at about the same time as this story was posted!

Anyway, I was quite impressed - watched lots of it through an internet live stream. The humanoids still have a way to go, but in a few years, it will look much better.

There are lots of videos on http://www.robocup.zdf.de/ [robocup.zdf.de] (in German).

SmilingBoy.

Re:Games as an AI research platform.

[Avian visitor]

FYI, though RoboCup has been around for a long time, the past few years have seen a sudden surge of interest in the use of games as a platform for AI research.

Some time ago I had some interest in AI research. I visited an international Robocup event in Slovenia because I thought I might see some interesting concepts being used there.

I talked with several teams and I was quite surprised when I saw how primitive the their programs were. They basically had thousand nested "if" statements. No neural nets or anything remotely advanced. When I asked them if no one uses such things they said that there were some experiments but "if" statements just work better in practice.

The Robocup competition I saw there didn't require any special AI or engineering skills from team members at all. All teams had identical robots that were mass-manufactured by some company. Image analysis software (for determining the position of the ball and robots with a video camera), communications software, etc. were also already written for them. The software didn't even have to be written with embedded systems in mind because it ran on a powerful PC (the robot itself was only a radio-controlled black box).

As far as I know, the whole tournament could have been played entirely in software. The little robots were there only for the audience to see something.