Robo-dynasty prevails at RoboCup

The finest robot-building teams in the world showcased their latest creations on campus at RoboCup 2007, the international robot competition and symposium held from July 1 through July 10.

Team Osaka from Japan stole the spotlight by winning the Louis Vuitton Best Humanoid Cup for the fourth year in a row for their team in the kid-size humanoid soccer league. The Cup goes to the team that accumulates the most points in the individual competitions and technical challenges, not necessarily to a team that wins their league's championship.

"It is the most prestigious award you can win. Every year it's so hard, especially this year. The robots improve so fast so every year we are responding, and it's getting harder to win," said Tomotaka Takahashi, a member of Team Osaka and founder of Robo-Garage at Kyoto University.

Team Osaka finished second in the kid-size humanoid competition, falling short by a score of 8-6 in the championship match to NimbRo from the University of Freiburg in Germany. NimbRo also won the teen-size humanoid league, and finished second and third in the Best Humanoid ranking.

In the small-size league, the CMDragons from Carnegie Mellon University won the championship match, outpacing Plasma-Z from Thailand by a score of 9-7.

"It's a challenge every year and this year in particular. The final went into overtime and it actually went all the way into penalty kicks, just like FIFA soccer," said Carnegie Mellon's James Bruce.

The four-legged league championship went to Northern Bites, of Bowdoin College, and the mid-size title went to Brainstormers Tribots of the University of Osnabruck in Germany, who also won the 2D competition in the soccer simulation league.

Other simulation winners were, in the 3D league, WrightEagle of the University of Science and Technology of China; in the 3D development league Team RoboLog of the University of New Castle and Technical University of Freiburg in Germany; and in Physical Visualization the winner was Team Helena of Osaka University.

This year marked the first time in RoboCup's history that the event was held on a university campus, and the visitors to Tech had glowing praise for the campus and its facilities.

"[The CRC is] a very good building. We don't have such a thing in our university. It's so interesting for me that students have such facilities for sports," said Kianoosh Mokhtarian, a member of the Impossibles team, composed of Iranian university students who competed in the four-legged league.

"The campus is so spacious, and the scenery is beautiful. I really like this campus and also the town," said Takahashi from Team Osaka.

However, the switch to a campus setting brought some complaints mixed in with the compliments.

"We thought it was a great venue, and what I especially liked was that you can stay on campus for the housing. What was a little bit of a problem was that the competitions were in different [locations], for example, the simulation league [in the TSRB at Tech Square] and four legged and middle size leagues [in the CRC] were [in Tech Square and the CRC], and it was kind of difficult to get to the [locations]," said Martin Riedmiller, a professor at the University of Osnabruck and leader of the Brainstormers Tribots.

Although the robot soccer matches are the main feature of RoboCup, there was exciting competition in the other leagues as well.

King Mongkut's Institute of Technology in Thailand won in the rescue league, where the competition was to locate as many infants (portrayed by noise-making dolls) in a disaster scene as possible. In the rescue simulation leagues, the agent competition was won by MRL from Azad University in Iran. Steel from the University of Pittsburgh won the Virtual Robots competition, and AlladinRescue from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom won in the Intrastructure competition.

In the Robocup@Home league, which is based on real-world applications of human-robot interaction, AllemaniACS from the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany won the title.

A new development for this year was the Nanogram Demonstration league, where microscopic robots completed various challenges. The inaugural competition was won by ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology).

RoboCup 2008 is scheduled to be held in Suzhou, China, fifty miles west of Shanghai. RoboCup's objective is to produce a robot team by 2050 that can defeat the human world champions in soccer.