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RoboCup 2003
Kylose Boondoggler writes "Sony AIBOs play soccer against each other in the American Open 2003, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in preparation for RoboCup '03. Teams from all over North and South America (including teams from Georgia Tech, Cornell, and UPenn) will compete in various leagues from soccer-playing AIBO to pure computer simulations. Local newspaper coverage is provided by The Tartan. Honda's ASIMO will also make an appearance along with rescue robots constructed by Carnegie Mellon."
I think it would be a lot cooler if these robots would drive my car instead of just playing soccer.
"Alcohol, cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" -Homer Simpson
Either the title: "Robocup" (hehe..do robots even need that protection?) or the idea of aibo's going against each other competitively. That's just hilarious! I wish I could be there.
The anti-salmon
This seems like it would be a pretty fun event to watch. I have had some experience with robotics helping out with high-school students. In my area there is what we call *CCRA.
* County Compettive Robbotics Association; The students (as teams) got kits of motors, electronics, pnuematics (etc.) to mess around with, and in the end create a working bot to use in a competition!
.noitacidem deen uoy siht daer nac uoy fI
Cornell usually kicks ass as this, looks like they're dominating the small robot league again.
BTW: watching robots play soccer is really, really boring, but coding them to play sounds kind of interesting. Is there any software out there similar to ASM-Robots that lets you do something like that?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Which RoboCop movie is this anyway? 4? 5? I always hate when they change the naming schemes from a number to a year. Anyway, hopefully RoboCop gets back to kicking ass.
interesting concept, hefty price tag!
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Free your mind.
Does this mean that they'll all go around sniffing each-other's butts?
[insert witty comment here]
Since dogs traditionally chase mailmen, I think this would be more fitting.
Just replace the people who deliver mail with the people who spam us with e-mail, and you have a smash hit!
You'd need to give Aibo some teeth though, and I've got some old and rusty Exacto-knife blades that would fit the bill perfectly.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
If Cornell wins this maybe they'll finally start to get some positive coverage in the news after their last few fuckups, unless they send congratulation emails out to the losers... but i digress...
And I wondered where the Rat Things in Snow Crash came from.
There are a bunch of videos here, they appear to be of varying sizes...though the first one I started downloading is still going strong and just passed the 42 meg mark...actually, right as I was writing this it stopped, so it is 43 megs...so the videos are big and long (hopefully). Enjoy.
The anti-salmon
Alan alda has a great show about aibo soccer in his scientific frontier show.
Okay, it can't compete with Aibos for cute (or irony), but there is a much more exciting way to go: FIRST high school robotics (http://www.usfirst.org/), an international competition for high school robotics teams.
These are 130 lb robots with between one and two horsepower, running both autonomously and with radio control, and playing a two against two timed game. The teams have six weeks in Jan. & Feb. to design, build, program, test and ship their robots. They start with a kit of parts (motors, robot controller, misc. hardware) and build their robots for a game which changes every year.
There are 800 teams in the US, Canada, the UK and Brazil and 23 regional competitions, plus the championship event which was held in the Reliant Stadium in Houston last month. We used the Astrodome for our pits!
As a mentor and parent of two team members (http://www.cybersonics.org/), I can tell you this is a blast! I encourage everyone to take a look at it and think about getting involved. Most teams are always looking for mentors and new teams are starting every year.
robot soccer is seriously something that influences my career decisions. it's just so damn cool.
chillax137
If there are any AI Uni Lecturers among the slashdot readership, take my advice as a former student and do something like this for your students as an assignment - it will be one of the best they ever do. The server software and API documentation is free to download, and players may be implemented in amy language you want.
How about a slashdot effort for next years cup?
Do not meddle in the affairs of SysAdmins, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
I saw a few matches, they were pretty good. You guys actually posted it after the event ended--but it was lots of fun. The Honda guy gave a talk here on Friday. I heard it was interesting enough but his accent was kind of broken. As for the ASIMO--it was very cool. He walked around and went up and down stairs and such. Pretty impressive for a humanoid robot. It was one of the three feet ones. Otherwise, just another weekend at CMU. Finals next week, wish me luck...
For those interested, I'm on the CMU Simulation league team, and I have about 30 photos from the American Open:
Photos
And as an update to the original post, the American Open concluded about an hour ago, with the CMU AIBO team winning the finals in competition against Cornell.
I watched this last year. It was being broadcast when some company (forgot which) was testing thier streaming technology.
I was surprised by how entertaining it was.
The AI for little robot dogs do all kinds of things.
When they score a goal the do a little dance, and when there other teammates see them doing a little dance they start dancing. LOL it was pretty funny.
Now I've seen Everything
...for the last year students at the IT-engineering program, and have had so for a couple of years now.
Pretty pictures of their two robots:
http://www.robocup.it.uu.se/
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law
Well, it's interesting to see that this is starting to pick up in the US as well. Last year we (we = project team from Uppsala University, Sweden) competed in the RoboCup 2002, which was being held in Japan at the same time as the 'normal' soccer world cup. It was an extremely interesting experience and the exhibition floor and competitions were on the floor of a huge indoor baseball arena (maximum capacity: 50 000). During three days of competition about 100,000 people showed up.
:-) ). Teams who compete in this league obviously don't have to construct the hardware which might be nice for all the software guys out there. In most other leagues you build the robots from standard off-the-shelf components.
It's a shame you don't have what I consider the most interesting leagues though - the middle size and the humanoid league. Those are the ones that require most work and has least competitors, so it might be hard to get a full league I suppose. Middle size robots have everything onboard and have to do everything by themselves. There are quite a few teams in Europe and Japan, coming from universities but also some companies (Philips, dutch home electronics company, had a good middle size team last year.)
Further, FYI, Aibo robots are programmed by the team, so the kind of tricks and cool stuff they do depends on who programmed them (and how much time they had...
There is also a German Open which is being held in Paderborn, Germany, sometime soon. Further, the world championships, the real RoboCup 2003, is being held in Padua, Italy in the summer. This is from the top of my head, I don't have any URL:s, but I'm sure they can be found with a quick search.
FYI Cornell doesn't compete in the AIBO league.
Cornell does compete in the F180 small size league. The real test will be in Padua Italy in early July. As a reminder, Robocup 2003 is the real competition.
Seeing that CMU didn't place in the top four at Fukuoka last year, while Cornell took the title, congratulations to CMU. And good luck in Italy.
-- Len
The entire contest seems kind of boring, as it is supposed to use robots built by someone else.
Eurobot is a contest for completely autonomous robots that are constructed for the contest.
The rules can be found at www.anstj.org.
The basic idea is to find and flip 12 twocoloured pucs, so that the color you fight for is up. Two robots compete for 1.5 minutes, and the pucs are placed on the board after the robots.
This year 32 teams from Europe and Asia are competing. My teams homepage is here, but in Norwegian, to not give away too much to our competitors.
Now there are even more soccer teams that can kill mine (we haven't won in two years)
And what's worse we'd be losing to a few thousand dollar pieces of plastic and metal that are at the most 10 inches tall
It's funny how, whenever USA people are bad at something, they create their own league/competitions/(countries :), and let crappy countries compete against them. One particular Australian University, i.e. mine, has dominated the Sony Aibo league competition for the past 3-4 years so much, that the closest game they had, they won by 10 goals. I wonder why they're not included in this "American Open" crap...
I think robotic sports competitions are a great idea. It helps younger generations get interested in technology, and definately spawns some creative innovations. I watched a special on TechTV recently ... http://www.techtv.com/news/shownotes/story/0,24195 ,3425334,00.html
one thing that surprised me was the segment on Asimo. They commented that there are multiple engineers controlling Asimo while he is on stage. With all of the money and research Honda has put into this robot, why does it still require mutliple humans to control it?
For the HS crowd, there's Botball, which had it's DC area competition this weekend at UMCP, sponsored by the K.I.S.S. Institute for Practical Robotics. KIPR also puts together neat kits if you're looking for something to play with (a word of advice, Interactive-C blows and it's type checking system is flakey at best).
There's also Trinity Colleges's Autonomous Robotics Firefighting Contest which has a league for just about anybody. Qualifying alone is an impressive feat.
Also, if you're interested in the simulation league, you may be interested in checking out this paper which was written by one of the profs in my department.
</karmawhoring>
sorry about the link Here it is.
how else would they protect their nuts?
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
For a few years in a row, Carnegie Mellon was world champion. Then, around 4-5 years ago, Cornell started winning on a regular basis. (Note: There is a chance that Big Red has been surpassed in the last year or two, but up until my junior year there, i.e. two years ago, CU was #1.) Hmm, according to http://robocup.mae.cornell.edu/, Big Red won in 2002. In the history it looks like they came in third in '01 for some reason. Also note that there are multiple RoboCup divisions, Cornell competes in the "small size" division.
Not surprising considering that the CU RoboCup effort is heavily sponsored by the M&AE department, which also is behind Cornell's #1 Formula SAE racing team.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"soccer is really, really boring, but coding them to play sounds kind of interesting."
Sounds like a true slashdotter to me! Give that man some Karma.
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