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Technology

Robocup 2002 Now Underway 182

Posted by michael from the eulogy-for-the-U.S.-team dept.
ChenLing writes "Forget small robots on wheels playing soccer...193 teams from 30 countries have built androids to play soccer at 'RoboCup'. Although as the article says, it will be a while before we can pit androids vs humans on the same field....." Our previous story has background links and information about the contest.
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Robocup 2002 Now Underway More

Robocup 2002 Now Underway

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  • ... until the robots try to escape!

  • Ouch (Score:2, Funny)

    by d_lesage ( 199542 )
    Although as the article says, it will be a while before we can pit androids vs humans on the same field

    Wouldn't want to get tackled by one of those.

    I guess there wouldn't be as much faking on the field then...

    • Re:Ouch (Score:3, Funny)

      by EFGearman ( 245715 )
      Hey, I'd just hate to be slide tackled by one. Forget anything else. That would hurt.

      EFGearman
    • Other instances where playing against a robot opponent will make you consider chaning your day job:

      1) You're the last man between him and the keeper, and you've got to make the tackle. You just know the bastard programmer's going to have him step on your balls.

      2) Wall in front of a robot free kick. You think that he's calculating where to hit a 200mph ball so it ricochets off you and in.

      3) Goalie during a penalty shot.

      4) In the box for a robot corner kick. Hmm...lots of metal trying to get to a ball you're trying to get to...with metal elbows...

      5) The road team playing in the robot team's home stadium...and all the drunk robot hooligans are in force.

      I think I'll keep my organic and non-organic players separate. The robots would have a far easier time winning than Big Blue ever did.

  • whats next (Score:1, Redundant)

    by JeanBaptiste ( 537955 )
    robot hooligans?

  • Bleh (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ALoverOfPeace ( 586114 )
    Who wants to watch robots play soccer [battlebots.com]?
    • who wants 20 min of talking and only 5 min of real robot fighting the BBC has a robot wars type show several years ago that was way better they also had to go thru obstacle course and to allot more than just fight. The robots in robot wars on comedy central would get torn to shreds to the old school ones on robot wars on the BBC
      • Yes, in the English spirit of giving so much more you got 45 minutes of talking and a whole 10 minutes of fighting. :-)

        Honestly, Comedy Central's Battlebots is a lot better than Robotica, which has the obstacle course format you were speaking of. That show is just plain f-ing boring.

        And the third choice here is part pro wrestling (they have an ex-wrestler for an announcer) and it is the LAMEST...SHOW...EVER!!!
        • And the third choice here is part pro wrestling (they have an ex-wrestler for an announcer) and it is the LAMEST...SHOW...EVER!!!

          That third choice is, of course, the American version of Robot Wars. The early episodes were filmed in the UK using Mick "Mankind" Foley, who is just terrible as an announcer.

          On the other hand, the UK version has one of the actors from "Red Dwarf" hosting. Geeks love his silly English accent and bad puns, but it's not for everyone [somethingawful.com].
    • ...fighting it out. 'Battle Bots' are just big-ass RC cars with weapons too weak to do any real damage. Also, who wants to mod up a post referencing a show on Comedy Central? Huh..
      • with weapons too weak to do any real damage

        Come back and post again after you have actually watched the show, ok? Not every design is a shredder, but there are many designs that are quite effective. Or do you want to see flamethrowers and tacnukes? :-)
        • > Come back and post again after you have actually watched the show, ok? Not every design is a shredder, but there are many designs that are quite effective. Or do you want to see flamethrowers and tacnukes? :-)

          Dude, this is Slashdot. OF COURSE WE DO!

        • In Robot wars series 5 the robots have evolved quite a bit - the most effective weapons being powerful pincers (aka. Razor, which can cream 95% of the robots out there... it normally only loses if it gets driven into a pit or something) and flippers (Chaos II, which likes to finish rounds by throwing the robots [which weigh about half a ton] clean out of the ring, and WheelyBigCheese, which recently threw a robot from the middle of the ring, through the air and out of the ring, where it nearly demolished the protective barriers).

          The weedy Axes and stuff are generally only used by newbies - they're pretty useless.

          Mind you, I wouldn't like to meet any of those things in a dark alley...

          Robot Wars has flamethrowers btw. - both the house robots and the ring itself have them. They're not terribly effective against a titanium shell.

          Tacnukes would vapourise the judges, so it'd probably be declared a draw...
  • Clearly not true. Haven't the writers seen talk-show hosts?

  • 50 years? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jglow ( 525234 )
    The RoboCup people have made it their goal to create a team of robots tht will beat the world cup winner by 2050. Pretty amazing stuff.

  • US Team (Score:1)

    by red5 ( 51324 )
    eulogy-for-the-U.S.-team dept.

    Yah, like the US count be germany at this :)

  • Robocop 2002? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Nermal ( 7573 )
    Ok, did anybody else read that as 'robocop 2002' and cringe?

  • I wonder if there is a Zlatko Zahobot or a Keanebot that stomps off the field calling the coach a "Gearhead now and a gearhead when he was a player." Do you give the players punchcards instead of booking them the old fashioned way? What about hooliganbots that trash serverrooms after England gets whipped by the Faroe Islands?
  • Robots playing football with an exploding ball. What a great game!
  • Will they get thier own team for World Cup play?
  • Was I the only one that thought this was the latest Ronco invention?

  • I'm on a team... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21, 2002 @02:26PM (#3744949)
    I'm on the University of Virginia team, and we're in the simulation league. We don't have physical robots. The result is we don't have to spend the effort on mechanical concerns and image recognition, and we get to devote more effort to the AI aspect of the competition. In the simulation league, the robots DO get tired, they do miss shots, and they have imperfect information. The idea is to remove all physical considerations from play and have them win on intellect alone. The robots being used in competition are no where near the level required to beat a world cup team, but I imagine that once they get close, these "humanizing [about.com]" factors will be added to keep the match fair. At the current rate of development, I expect this to be well before 2050.
    • That's pretty bad programming on your part if they miss you should devote more to the angle calculation algorithms. What the hell do they get tired from???? Why the hell do they have imperfect information all they need is better sensors oh wait this is all simulated so its crappy programming on your part if your going to simulate something simulate it to the best of your abilities putting voluntary problems in to a program sounds like Microsoft tactics

  • Wow. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bluemilker ( 264421 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @02:26PM (#3744953) Homepage
    I didn't realize robotics had gotten anywhere near this point. I think a lot of people underestimate exactly how hard it is to get a robot to do something like, for example, find a ball. Now these robots are walking (a significant challenge, from my experience... :) kicking a ball, and interacting with each other? Pretty incredible.

    I wonder how sophisticated these humanoids can get. Can they pick themselves up if they stumble? Can they figure out whether another robot is on their team? Can they pass? The article seems to imply that at this point, they're not that much more than glorified mechanical penalty kickers.
    • Most don't walk. They have wheels that are optimized for lateral movement and such. They do have an Aibo division that is quite interesting in regards to walking and shooting.
    • so i saw a scientific american frontiers show on PBS quite a while ago, never cared much for the robocup stuff until i'd seen that, and now, man is it ever awesome to read about... ultimatedly i think this is a great way to make technology "fun," there's too much seperation of the mega-sports leagues vaguely reminescent of ancient gladitorial social-control and the arts & sciences...

      but anyway:
      Can they pick themselves up if they stumble? Can they figure out whether another robot is on their team? Can they pass?

      as of last year the 4-legged autonomous robots (there are different leagues: 2 & 4 legged autonomous, and 'wheeled boxes' of which the team is controlled by one computer and viewed by an omnipotent eye (above the playing field)) could pass to one another, recognize team vs. non-team (by color i believe, though unsure), and even 'squeaked' to one another to announce control of the ball if out of the line of sight of team-mates (ie behind them). at the time the SciAm show was aired the 2-legged league was mostly focusing on walking, but then again a couple of years ago the 4-legged league had robots that couldn't get up if knocked over, and oftentimes got 'confused' and would endlessly wander into a corner...

      while world-cup is amazingly awesome (mostly in it's humanizingly unifiying potential) i think robocup could ultimately become a unifier of 'fun technlogy' with a world-wide audience. of course i could be dead wrong (which i usually am...).

      my $2*10^(-2)

      -tid242

    • Re:Wow. (Score:3, Informative)

      by gmarceau ( 119282 )
      I was on the McGill Aibo robot team in '99, 2000 and 2001. Every year we coded like mad apples all through the competition, days and night relaying each other. Thus, this is the first year I can post about it

      Usualy the code is divided six ways : vision, mapping, odometry, decision making, real-time sensing and real-time motion commands.

      The first three set us the real robots from the simulation. No mater are much simulation leaged proud themselves about dealing with noise - gaussian noise is nothing like what Mother Nature throws at you through real sensors : shadows, glare, obstruction, tripping, pixellation, ccd noise even the crowd. All those can throw your system off on a wim.

      The decision making is as easy as your base three module is solid. Its architecture gets a bit tricky though. At McGill we eventually came up with a small bytecoded language to ease the job, and ran an interpreter an the dogs. Cool stuff.

      The first year competing with the Aibo, walking was the bottleneck. Whoever could walk to the ball won. The year after, the walking had gotten better, and localisation became key. Every could walk to the ball, but only the better robots had tracked their position well enough to know which direction to kick it to when arriving. In 2001, speed and reliability of the whole made the cut.

      And to answer your question : yes, the Aibo stubble over all the time. It makes a good shows when compared to the larger robots which are extra careful not to run into each other. Nobody wants to break anybodyelse's research baby.

      Moreover, since the Aibos are equiped with gyroscopes, getting yourself up is only a mater of : if (gyro.vertical() > 45degs) { bring the legs in, bring the legs out }

      The dogies have miniature ccd camera and couldn't really tell team appart. The large wheels robots, which have full sized frame grabber, can. Acting on the information is harder. Even if you see your teamate, you have to be able to mesure speed in order to complete a pass - and that adds a source of real-world noise to your system. Few teams manage to get it right, but it gets better every year.

      They are certainly more than automated kickers. Better, it does wonderful thing for robot research and is alot of fun to participate in.
  • Let's get this technology implemented for Doom.

    Then again...
  • Unlike the british experiment, I doubt we'll find these robots in a parking lot. (*evil grin*)


    However, this does raise a question; When these robots get to the point of being able to really _play_ soccer, what happens when they slam into each other? They have to be able to get back up, re-orient themselves, etc. Raises the question of Asimov's three laws....could they decide to actually harm another robot on purpose to impair its playing ability? (Red card on B-001-05-NZ18 !)

    • Not just another robot, consider this:

      The robots could never win because they could never be programed to "play dirty". Think about it, when a human does something underhanded to hurt another player you think "That guy is a dick" but it is understandable because he is human and so are you.

      If a robot did this, there would be serious reprecussions to both the robot, and the designer. No one would accept a robot that behaved this way, therefore the humans will alway have a considerable advantage.

      In the same vein, this is why it is especially tough to build automated drivers for automobiles. With a human bus driver, an accident seems like an inevitable fact of life. To make a robotic driver with human intelligence requires it to also have human faults. It might, late at night, mistake the road as going off in the wrong direction and crash the car. The problem is, for a robot to do this is unacceptable.

      This is why really building a robot is so difficult: because of people's relation to them.

      People want robots to have the intelligence of people, while requiring the reliability of machines.

      Is this possible? Probably, but it is most likely very difficult. Probably even more difficult than simply creating a AI "as good" as a persons.


      ---Lane
    • I think they have charging penalities. I am not quite sure of the details, but if a robot detects another robot is approaching it, it must make maneuvers to get out of the way (such as move in a different direction). Likewise, if a robot detects it is moving itself toward another robot, it must change course. If two robots are charging each other, and only one attempts to prevent the collision, a foul/penalty is called on the other robot.

      All this is in the rulebook, which probably has a stricter definition of how the whole situation works.
  • Although as the article says, it will be a while before we can pit androids vs humans on the same field....."

    Unless, of course, those androids happen to be buzzsaw wielding, flame throwing, high voltage instruments of death himself [battlebots.com] (and we mix up the rules a bit)

    Let's face it, you'd watch it :)
  • Of course it takes that long to clear the dinner table. Look how short they are!

  • I wonder.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord_Slepnir ( 585350 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @02:29PM (#3744981) Journal
    ....and will be programmed never to commit fouls...

    Or, if the programers were smart, to only commit them when the ref was looking away

    if (theirscore - ourscore > 3)
    {
    robot1.fall_down_and_cry_like_an_argentinian();
    while(robot2.check_refs_paying attention() = true)continue;
    robot2.break_other_teams_forwards_shin();
    }

    • Better:

      While(entire_world_watches)
    • More like a brazilian... Hit me in the shins with a ball and I will go down crying clutching my head....
  • "Today, however, the simplest act remains a tremendous challenge for any robot."

    Well, all they need to create artifical boredrom is a robot with a scoop, and a herring sandwich....

  • Real Soccer? (Score:3, Funny)

    by KnightNavro ( 585943 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @02:31PM (#3744993)
    Is programing at the point where it can truly emulate soccer? Will they shoot the losing goalie? Will the Italian league fire the Korean when he scores against the Italian national team? Most importantly, will they riot?
  • I hope Robocop goes and beats up those lousy terrorists!

    ...oh, wait. RoboCUP?

    That's just boring, then...
  • Even though it is very simple soccer, it is still amazing to think that they can have teams actually play against each other. Taking sports or anything that we do everyday and create machines that can do it can have many positive impacts in the future. Who knows maybe they'll find a more efficient way for robots to run, which in return might result into better prostetics for humans. The more interesting aspect is the AI however. I wouldn't mind taking a look at those algorithms. IMHO.
  • I'm not a big sports fanatic or anything but shouldnt some things be left to humans. Sure we create these nifty robots that bend to our every command and do as they are programed for. But how lazy does that make us...we're now making robots to play our sports, teachers will eventually be dubbed out for computer interaction (i.e. DDR in Gym class, what will come next? I shudder to think...

    I got my ramen noodles, and my torengos and my beer...everything else I dont nessacarily need!
    • But how lazy does that make us...we're now making robots to play our sports, teachers will eventually be dubbed out for computer interaction

      you're missing the point, we're not trying to create robots so that worldcup players can take a break, they're building robots that can solve problems, and since it's an international effort they chose a dynamic medium (unlike chess et al.) that has global interest/understanding. making a robo-football (americano) would have about as much interest in the rest of the world as a robo-sumo would here in the states...

      and as far as replacing teachers w/ computers, espcially jr. or sr. high teachers: how many students are already having their teachers be replaced by google? honestly there's more information online ready for consumption at your own pace (oft much faster than in a classroom setting) than any teacher could ever supply anyone with. true human interaction, blah blah blah, but face it, for people interested in learning technology will be a panacea.

      sorry this is a bit off-topic, but isn't that the way discussions usually go?

      -tid242

      • I guess when you put it that way in a sense it is reasonable to do as such and create these bots to extend what we can make them do, and how far we can enhance our experiments on technology...

        but its still just one view point of many on this topic i guess..such as mine...no harm done...

        if you think about it..we have bots to play chess against us why? to challenge us to make us think harder to be an programed bot that has books of moves in its system? If we are using bots in our sports, how will that make us better?
        and putting computers in school...sure its great for us to learn more about technology especially in this day and age...hell 3 yr olds know how to use the internet, that now is nothing surprising to us...infact as soon as all teachers are out of the picture come to think of it (shedding new light into own view point, beginning to change) students can learn how to read and write with visual and sound basic programs that can be loaded at home...no more school! yay!

        thinking way ahead of time and probably making no sense here; going back to old mind frame: then again everyone would be hermits, no? Sit at home on their computers all day and read and type to eachother but not physically go outside because on tv they have battlebots or someother revolutionized form of android sports they can watch...what other interaction (human to human) or job will we have if we build robots and computers to make our lives easier and easier....and our learning process faster because we dont have to wait on someone to teach us....and by default, using common social conformity..its easy to assume that could happen, you put an idea into stupid peoples heads and they will look around to see if everyone else is doing it; tell them they wont need to do much and can find their whole life on computers or using robots then they will rely on computers and robots..........
        sure its a wonderful step forward into technology future..but isnt it a step back too? (in some odd, demented way in my head)...i have no idea i'm rambling...just forget i typed anything...

        robots good? robots bad? technology good? technology bad? ahhhhh!!! my head!!!! make it stop!!!!
  • i realize there's a lot of work behind this sort of thing....and that soccer really isn't the point....

    ...but really...i would whip all of them.

    and bash soccer all you want. bash ALL sports. they've all gone too far.
  • Carnegie Mellon University's hypothetical Robotics Channel [cmu.edu] covers yet another exciting robot sporting event.

  • Robocup special on PBS.. (Score:4, Informative)

    by bje2 ( 533276 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @02:43PM (#3745053)
    recently i watched a PBS (i think) special on the Robocup...must've been from 2001, if the 2002 one is going on right now...it was hosted by Alan Alda...anyway, it was really interesting...

    some of the things the teams could do were amazing...while most teams basically used "brute force" to push the ball into the net, there were some advanced teams that could actually recognize teammates and pass the ball to them...that was pretty impressive...the had kind of a pinball type flipper kinda thing that would poke out near their feet...

    another cool thing was that some of the robots (i think it was the same team that could do the advanced passing) could actually "trap" the ball...they had a spinning bar on their front, so as the ball came to them, the bar would spin, and they could keep control of it, by basically continually spinnning the ball towards themselves...kinda like a tread mill...

    another progressive idea (and i'm sure the slashdot/open source community will appreciate this) was that after the competition is over, all of the teams are required to share their source code, so everyone starts on the same plane for the next year of research... it's really a cool speical if you can catch it while you're flipping the channels sometime....
    • after the competition is over, all of the teams are required to share their source code

      That's kind of like how real players exchange jerseys after games. Sweat and all [smh.com.au].

    • That's our team! (Score:3, Informative)

      by LenE ( 29922 )
      The Cornell Big Red team is the one that introduced the spinning bar (dribbler), omnidirectional travel, and passing. You have to see these robots in action to appreciate how well this works.

      Our current robots can trap the ball and move from one end of the field to the other, backwards in under a second. The ball looks like it is stuck to the robot! On top of just pulling the ball in, they also have a transverse dribbler so that the robot can also move side to side without loosing the ball at the end of the roller.

      Most teams are pure CS majors, but Cornell uses a team of Mech. E., EE, and CS students. By doing this, the team can concentrate on developing more innovative robots with new features to better play the game.

      Oh, and brute-force is forbidden by the rules. A ref. is supposed to assess penalties against robots that hit into the opposing team's players.

      -- Len
  • The motivation behind these human-shaped robots is not at all the same as the motivation of the wheeled robot soccer tournaments. The whole point behind the small robots on wheels is to learn and improve on teamplay and improvisional skills from a software level, not in mimicry of physical ability. These approaches to robot design aren't competitive, they are parallel in the pursuit of higher functionality.

  • How About a What's New File? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GeekLife.com ( 84577 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @02:46PM (#3745071) Homepage
    I'd like to see a comparison of this year's robots vs. last year's. What new features are being tried out, how much closer are we to the dream of beating the best humans, and what strategies are being rethought?

    Everyone always talks about how fast technology like this advances, but when I watch the little Aibo's fight it out, it always looks the same to me. Can anyone provide insight?

    • That would depend on each team that is participating, and what league you want to know about. The "Humanoid" league is new this year, so everything there is new.

      The software agent, small, medium, and quadraped (AIBO) are returning leagues. Unfortunately, the results page [robocup2002.org] doesn't have any in-depth information about what teams have done to improve, or what gives certain teams an edge.

      I know that the Cornell Big Red (small league) team derrives much of it's success (two-time champion, placed third last year) from being multi-discipline based team. For the entire year, separate CS, ME, and EE teams work on improving every aspect of their robots and the AI that they run on.

      This year, their robots are faster, more agile and have better ball control. Since they design and construct their own team, they can optimize all aspects of their team's performance. Other teams are primarily CS based, some even buying their robots off-the-shelf (in addition to the AIBO-toy league which is hardware constrained). Many of these teams can only focus on improving the AI to match what they have.

      One thing that I haven't seen on the RoboCup site though is a listing for their first eleven-on-eleven match. Most physical games are five-on-five, except for the humanoid league, which is still nascent.

      The eleven-on-eleven match is an exhibition match between Cornell's 2001 robots and another team that placed second last year's tournament. I'm not sure who the other team is, but I know that they are really good as well.

      -- Len

  • Three laws (Score:5, Funny)

    by rgoer ( 521471 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @02:51PM (#3745092)
    1. A robot may not score on his team's own goal, or, through inaction, allow his team's goal to be scored upon.

    2. A robot must obey the orders given it by coaches except where such orders would conflict the First Law.

    3. A robot must protect its own field position as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
  • It would be interesting to give each robot a personality, have them play a game, and use the results to predict human behavior.

    The next step would be to refine each personality, perhaps trying to emulate a real soccer player, and continue to use the robots to predict the outcome of a game or to find a particular weakness in a player.

    It would at least be popular with gamblers. :)

    • I'm not sure it would be very interesting. We'd end up with 2 sides that won't communicate beyond killing a few of each other whenever possible. At least if we were really trying to mimic personality. Just look at the state of global affairs right now - we're just too self-destructive to be interesting.
  • I nominate yesterday's robot [slashdot.org]! A stadium full of these and I think I'll stay home and watch the game on Pay-per-View.

  • Forget small robots on wheels playing soccer ...

    Please let not forget about those small robots, the design and contest goals are quite different for the small/medium league versus the humanoid league. If I'm not mistaken one of the contests in the humanoid league is standing on 2 feet for an amount of time (ok.. it's the first year for the humanoid league but come on this doesn't look really spectacular), so this league is mostly about designing humanoid robots and writing software for moving them around without falling.

    The small and medium size leagues are a lot more about designing distributed systems of autonomous agents and letting them sort out good strategies for play. I think the non humanoid leagues will be much nicer to look at for some years to come and forgetting about them will make a game of robotsoccer even harder to watch (watching one of those games still consists of waiting for a long time looking at robots that decided they better like it standing still.)

  • Human's will always win! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We'll just put a robots.txt file in our goal! :-)
  • ...when they build one that looks like Madonna and has a tongue.

    _
    I am not a troll. I am a vertically challenged bridge inspector!
  • Use Gaak, the escaped robot from the UK, to perform soccer tricks the other bots haven't discovered yet?
  • Why couldnt they teach them something important, like those nice robots from Krikkit...

  • The part of the article I found amusing was the end where they assure us that even if robots one day can beat us at soccer that we should still be proud, because building the robots was a human endeavor.

    Almost every article relating to some type of AI has to get those little insecurity-based digs in. It reminds me of all those Star Trek episodes where human beings are held up as the treasures of the universe.

    It's very telling and sad, really. We can't just celebrate achievement for its own sake, we have to tie it to our family, our school, our nation, or (at very least) our species.

    Unfortunately, I don't think that we'll lose that immaturity any time soon.
  • For any of you out there who might be UC Berkeley students there will be a decal offered next semester in which we will build a team to play in the Simulation league [sourceforge.net]. It'll be focused on developing the AI needed to do something like play soccer and should be a lot of fun. Watch the decal page [berkeley.edu] for more info.
  • Didn't Gary Linneker once say something like :'Soccer is a game of eleven against eleven, and in the end, the Germans win'?


  • Will they program female World Cup robots to take off their shirts if they win?
  • I bet Russ^H^H^H^Hsome of the commands considering to buy some of the best performers...

  • I think you are overestimating what is being done (Score:5, Informative)

    by sielwolf ( 246764 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @03:41PM (#3745383) Homepage Journal
    Ok, I'm not there but as far as I know android team v. android team is not being done this year, contrary to what the article is insinuating.

    According to the Official 2002 Robocup Humanoid League Draft Rule [robocup.org] there are three catagories of Current and Future events with several sub-sections. Here is the run down.

    * Standing Still on One Leg
    * Humanoid walk - out from one end, around a pylon and back,
    * Shoot - where the bot is able to shoot on the goal and get it in.
    * Penalty Shootout
    * 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 Soccer
    * Freestyle - Five minutes of judged performance art.

    According to the organizers they are just hoping to get some teams to try the first few! And as you can see the competitive playing of soccer is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaayy down the list and probably aren't even being attempted this 'Cup. Sure, those nice posed shots of those Sony bots look nice, but those aren't competition pictures. Sure, the information on the Official Robocup site [robocup2002.org] is sparse, but don't you think that they would have some big announcement if it did?

    This article from MSNBC is confusing one league (the humanoids) with another (the non-humanoid) in an attempt to create hype. Personally I think Robocup deserves it, but not by misconstruing what's going on.

    The best thing about the Robocup site is that you can actually watch the replays of the simulation games with Flash [uni-koblenz.de]. Pretty sweet.
  • Imagine getting kicked in the junk by one of these beasts, or heading-butting them while going for a header. Scary.
  • What I really want to see is robot hockey!

  • Aw, why can't they play football instead? (Score:3, Funny)

    by wackybrit ( 321117 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @04:20PM (#3745644) Homepage Journal
    Who wants to watch soccer? Why can't the robots play proper football instead?

    Oh, I forgot, they haven't got motors strong enough to carry all that wussy 'protection' gear, and robots are too smart to waste waiting 5 minutes between every play.
  • "In first round action today, the Brazil Nuts and Bolts defeated the Germany Robomench by a score of 10-1."

    Don't think this is a high scoring slaughter. They're using binary.

  • just like soccer (Score:3, Funny)

    by Apostata ( 390629 ) <apostataNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Friday June 21, 2002 @06:38PM (#3746778) Homepage Journal

    I'm to assume I'll have to wait years for German robots to stop winning?
    • I know members of the german team that plays in
      Fukuoka this year (4 legged league). They aren't
      too optimistic because in the first round, they
      play against the former world champion. UNSW
      is reported to be really good.
  • So what does a Robocup look like, exactly? And why do the robots need to wear a cup? Do they have Roboballs?
  • ...today's battery technologies.

    Would you watch a 90 minutes game only with 60 battery recharge breaks?

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