As mentioned in our last blog post, the Robot Hall of Fame has found a new home at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA. On behalf of the Robot Hall of Fame, we proudly announce this year’s inductees.

• NASA Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity
• iRobot Roomba (WOOT!!!! You go, Meticulor!)
• DaVinci Medical Robot System
• Huey, Dewey, and Louie, from the 1971 film “Silent Running”
• T-800 Terminator, from the 1984 film “The Terminator”

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Congratulations Class of 2010! Read on for more information about the Robot Hall of Fame!

As you can see from this year’s inductees, both real and fictional robots have been inducted into the hall of fame since its inception in 2003.

“Robots from Science – These are real robots that have served useful or potentially useful functions and demonstrated unique skills in accomplishing the purpose for which they were created. These may also be robots created primarily to entertain, as long as they function autonomously.

Robots from Science Fiction – These are fictional robots that have inspired us to create real robots that are productive, helpful, and entertaining. These robots have achieved worldwide fame as fictional characters and have helped form our opinions about the functions and values of real robots.” source

The creation of the Robot Hall of Fame was announced on the 30th of April, 2003, at the Opening Gala Celebration  for the RoboCup First American Open. (You may remember our recent post about the Robocup. The American Open is a local Robocup event, whereas the one we blogged about was the international competition; both are part of the same family of events).

If you can, I encourage you to visit the Robot Hall of Fame. You can view up-close many of the robots who have been honored with induction there, including many of our favorite television/movie robots of the past and present. Bask in the robotic glow of  star-bots such as:

• Maria
• Gort
• Robby
• B-9
• HAL 9000
• Dewey
• and last but certainly not least, C-3PO & R2-D2

Finally, you can take a look at this video to get a peek at the Robot Hall of Fame… as if you needed more of a reason to go!

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!