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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."
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.
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?
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I'd have to disagree with you. I've seen the videos from past RoboCup tournaments, and frankly, they're fascinating to me.
I think that watching the robots play is at least as entertaining as watching real soccer (of course, if you don't like watching any sports, well, can't blame you for not enjoying the roboversion..). I think it's simply amazing to watch a group of robots work as a team and form plays, some of which are very inventive.
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.
...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.
If you think that that's cool, you have to see a flying robots competition. I missed seeing the one a few years ago in Disney World by three days.
Well, that particular year had the first score by any team. It was spectacular. The team that scored used a helicopter design. It was really quite simple. Unfortunately, they didn't have a way to drop the disks in the goal, so the robot just ended up hovering over it for a while. That was the coolest competition of true robots that I've ever seen.
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?