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Robocup 2002 World Robot Soccer Championships
dipfan writes "While the rest of the world is watching the soccer world championships in Korea and Japan this summer, at the same time the Robocup 2002 competition for soccer-playing robots is to take place there - the sixth time the tournament has been held, with 35 countries competing and this time including a "humanoid league" competition. The purpose is to foster research in robotics, with the aim of building a team of robots that can play and win against the best human teams by 2050. One of the pre-tournament favourites this year is Iran, who did well in 2000 but not in 2001. The Swedish team includes a star player named Priscilla, described as "looking like a sister of the Terminator". One of the Swedish designers comments: 'you don't want to give too much freedom to the robots as they will go crazy.' Much like flesh-and-blood highly-paid sports stars really."
This project is an 'all encompassing' project involving so many research areas (vision, AI, real-time, networking, embedded, hardware, radio comms, more....). It is a very and interesting useful project from an academic point of view because you can put new research into something practical.
Research ideas are so often just theoritical, this is a chance to see how it works in a practical integrated system.