Robot Soccer World Cup Kicks Off

Robocup celebrates it's 10 year anniversary this year, and what better place to hold it than Germany, the host of the rather less significant human version of the game.

Robocup is the world cup of robot soccer. It consists of a number of different leagues, each with it's own particular focus. I was lucky enough to compete in the competition in 2001 (Seattle) and 2002 (Fukuoka - during the last world cup in Japan!) as part of Melbourne Uni's "roboMUtts" team, which consisted of five students developing software for four robot dogs (Sony Aibos) to pass, kick and defend, completely autonomously. Each dog is quite literally a walking computer, equiped with a CPU, a low resolution video camera mounted in it's nose, gyroscopic sensors so they know when they have fallen over (which often happened), and a wireless connection allowing communication with other team members. The "four-legged league", as it is known, disallows any hardware modifications to the supplied robots. Other leagues, such as the mid-size and small-size leagues allow teams to build their own robots, and so the focus is as much about hardware as it is about AI.

The competition gets varying levels of media attention, depending on where it is held. When we competed in Seattle, for example, we were put in a rather dingy convention centre. When we competed in Fukuoka, the competition was held in a baseball stadium, and saw about 100,000 people come to see the event. We were even signing autographs - albeit for 8 year old Japanese boys.

The research objective of the competition is to develop a team of humanoid soccer playing robots that can defeat the human world cup winning team, by 2050 (without killing them of course). Having not been involved in the competition for four years, I am not sure what progress has been made. This is actually one of the big problems with regularly competing in the competition. To be competitive at this level takes almost a full year of preparation, which doesn't leave a lot of time for publishing genuine research advances. Very little of the advances made in robocup, finds its way to the top journals and conferences (apart from the robocup symposium itself, held at the competition).

In any case, as a student of robotics, it is a fantastic experience, and certainly brings home the big challenges for robotics research - and from a marketing perspective, the competition is a gold mine.