RoboCup 2007 Wraps up

On the off chance you were in Atlanta, Georgia, this past weekend, I hope you were able to catch some of the RoboCup competition, an international joint project to promote AI and robotics (and related fields).

Nearly 300 teams from 37 countries competed in RoboCup 2007 Atlanta, the competition for research robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

All in all, approximately 1700 students and faculty from universities, high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools competed in events ranging from four-legged and humanoid robotic soccer games to search-and-rescue competitions.

Interestingly, this year’s event featured a demonstration of the Nanogram League, a competition between microscopic robots. The The RoboCup Nanogram competition challenged teams from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, U.S. Naval Academy, Carnegie Mellon University, and Simon Fraser University to construct microscopic robots that competed against each other in soccer-related agility drills. These robots measured a few tens of micrometers to a few hundred micrometers in their largest dimension and with masses ranging from a few nanograms to a few hundred nanograms. They operate under an optical microscope and are controlled by off-board electronics using visual feedback. There were three competitions: a 2mm Dash and a Slalom Drill, and a Ball Handling Drill -- all won by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology team.

Overall, the competition focused on three key application areas:

• RoboCupSoccer was an exercise in the design of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, robotics, and sensor-fusion, with the ultimate goal of developing a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer.
• RoboCupRescue. Technologies for search-and-rescue operations in large-scale disaster situations. This area is inteneded to couple technology with significant issues by providing human rescuers with enough information to safely perform a rescue.
• RoboCup@Home. Fostering development of useful robotic applications that assist humans in everyday.

As for winners, going through the results about the only thing I could make out is the RoboCup@Home
The AllemaniACs team from Germany won the event, with the UT-Austin Villa from the University of Texas coming in second, and Pumas from Mexico's UNAM university.

Results from the other events are still coming in. Maybe I should take the easy way out on this, and just say that in an event like RoboCup, everyone is a winner. Okay, that's wimpy -- but it's true.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:00 AM  Permalink