GOAL!!! Robocup 2009!
Last week, from June 29th to July 5th, Robocup 2009 was held in Graz, Australia. The Robocup project brings together robotics, AI and programming enthusiasts from all over the world and pits them against each other on the same playing field… literally! Above, we see the winners of the middle size league, Universität Stuttgart (Germany). In the finals, they took on Tech United from Eindhoven (The Netherlands) for the win with a dominating score of 4:1 (in Germany’s favor). The ultimate goal of the Robocup is to, “by the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can play and win against the human world champion soccer team.” source
By having the autonomous robot teams compete in standardized soccer games, every type of technology available can display its range within the same sets of limitations! These restraints are supposed to encourage the participants to think differently, and attempt new applications for the most recent advancements in the robotic sciences. These breakthroughs allow the competing teams to not only win the Robocup and achieve worldwide recognition for their efforts, they ultimately lead to social and industrial application.
“Preconditions for the successful participation at these competitions are extensive efforts in current research topics of computer science such as real-time image processing and architectures, cooperative robotics and distributed planning. Possible application scenarios of these research activities reach from autonomous vehicles, cooperative manufacturing robotics, service robotics to the point of planetary or deep-sea exploration by autonomous robotic systems. In this context autonomous means that no or only a limited human intervention is necessary.” source
Apparently, this year’s Robocup was one of the most interesting ever. Stuttgart’s team of cooperative soccer-playing robots advanced steadily through the competition, a total of thirteen teams representing eight different countries. They stripped the title from last year’s winners, Portugal, and blazed through their worthy foes (neighboring Austria and Italy, as well as teams from Iran, China, and, of course, Japan) before meeting The Netherlands on the field. The final test for the winning team was to play against the human officials of the Robocup Federation, against whom our valiant Stuttgart robots were as of yet no match. However, considering the advancements that have been made in the Robocup and in the field of robotics itself in the last few years, it would not surprise me in the least if the goal of the Robocup is met well before their 2050 deadline!
Posted in Features, Real Life Robots | 2 Comments »
July 10th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
It’s a very interesting subject I was looking around about more information but you got really what i was looking for in your article so thanks and keep it up you have a great blog , by the way Graz is a very lovely city I enjoyed it so much
July 12th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
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