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Robocup 2002 Now Underway
ChenLing writes "Forget small robots on wheels playing soccer...193 teams from 30 countries have built androids to play soccer at 'RoboCup'. Although as the article says, it will be a while before we can pit androids vs humans on the same field....." Our previous story has background links and information about the contest.
recently i watched a PBS (i think) special on the Robocup...must've been from 2001, if the 2002 one is going on right now...it was hosted by Alan Alda...anyway, it was really interesting...
some of the things the teams could do were amazing...while most teams basically used "brute force" to push the ball into the net, there were some advanced teams that could actually recognize teammates and pass the ball to them...that was pretty impressive...the had kind of a pinball type flipper kinda thing that would poke out near their feet...
another cool thing was that some of the robots (i think it was the same team that could do the advanced passing) could actually "trap" the ball...they had a spinning bar on their front, so as the ball came to them, the bar would spin, and they could keep control of it, by basically continually spinnning the ball towards themselves...kinda like a tread mill...
another progressive idea (and i'm sure the slashdot/open source community will appreciate this) was that after the competition is over, all of the teams are required to share their source code, so everyone starts on the same plane for the next year of research... it's really a cool speical if you can catch it while you're flipping the channels sometime....
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Ok, I'm not there but as far as I know android team v. android team is not being done this year, contrary to what the article is insinuating.
According to the Official 2002 Robocup Humanoid League Draft Rule there are three catagories of Current and Future events with several sub-sections. Here is the run down.
* Standing Still on One Leg
* Humanoid walk - out from one end, around a pylon and back,
* Shoot - where the bot is able to shoot on the goal and get it in.
* Penalty Shootout
* 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 Soccer
* Freestyle - Five minutes of judged performance art.
According to the organizers they are just hoping to get some teams to try the first few! And as you can see the competitive playing of soccer is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaayy down the list and probably aren't even being attempted this 'Cup. Sure, those nice posed shots of those Sony bots look nice, but those aren't competition pictures. Sure, the information on the Official Robocup site is sparse, but don't you think that they would have some big announcement if it did?
This article from MSNBC is confusing one league (the humanoids) with another (the non-humanoid) in an attempt to create hype. Personally I think Robocup deserves it, but not by misconstruing what's going on.
The best thing about the Robocup site is that you can actually watch the replays of the simulation games with Flash. Pretty sweet.
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