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RoboCup 2007 Opens At Georgia Tech
Craig writes "The 2007 installment of RoboCup has begun; individual events opened to the public today. RoboCup is an international robotics symposium and competition whose goal is to advance the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence to the point that in 2050 a robot soccer team can defeat the human world champions. This year, RoboCup is located on the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta, GA, marking the first time a university is hosting it and only the second time since it began in 1993 that it is located in the United States."
Having submitted this story (yes that's me up there) I thought this deserved a mention since Slashdot has reported on RoboCup in the past (2001, 2002) 2004, 2006).
I'm also covering this for our campus newspaper (click my name above for the preview article in last week's issue), so if anybody has anything they wanted to know or see pictures of let me know and I can try to make it happen. As I was bogged down with classes today I haven't seen any of the robots compete yet (although last week I "met" some still-unfinished robots being built by Georgia Tech students) but I intend to spend at least a few hours there tomorrow and every day the rest of the week.
(BTW, is anybody on here a participant in the event?)
audioLibre - freedom of music
First perhaps I should mention that RoboCup isn't only about football (soccer), although it's a majority, but also has leagues in rescue and a fairly new one called @home. I'm a participant on the rescue league (part of the Swedish team from Uppsala) and so far I can say that none of us is very impressed with Georgia Tech's handling of the cup. To start with there is no internet at the competition and development area which causes a lot of inconveniency whenever you need something of it (which is quite often). You'll either have to use the paid services one floor down, which I clocked to an amazing 700 byte per second when I tried to download the Linux headers I needed for driver installation, or walk at least five minutes to the dorms where the net is ok but you can't really do that every time you want to look something up. Secondly they don't seem to be able to keep the power up for more than a few hours at a time, it can go down quite unexpectedly without warnings. While this isn't much of a problem for my team seeing as we use only laptops and battery powered devices it is a real bother for many of the teams which uses normal stationary computers and other such devices. Being a student I never been to another RoboCup world cup (although I was at the German Open) but my teachers assures us that they never seen anything like this before. It is quite a bit of bad publicity for Georgia Tech.
I was actually a volunteer there yesterday during the team-practice session. I have some pictures and videos of the event at Hizook.com.