Category Archives: Competition

Unrolling in Hanover

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We arrived safely, we arrived tired, we arrived in a country were beer is king and robots are more king. We are embedded in the very center of sprawling industrial fair in Hanover. We are now in our second day of testing and our players are looking strong. Last night in a test scrimmage against the German Team and ended after one half with a tie of 1-1. Setup continues today with scheduled test matches. Our team played well against Cerberus in our first test match of the day, even though wireless was spotty and are players’ decision making was not at the best level. We have another test scrimmage this afternoon and hope to see our dogs once again in the best of states. Pool play begins tomorrow and we will make sure to post all information about our triumphs and place many sad emoticons around information of our losses.

2007 Rules

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4-Legged League Rules are out. [tzi.de/4legged]

Here’s a summary of the rule changes, which are few:

– Two beacons instead of four. Pink is not used as a color anymore.
– New goals.
– Corner kick points. Points closer to the penalty area than the end of the throw-in lines were added at which the ball is placed when the defending team kicks the ball out over the end line.

Here’s an note on a change that wasn’t to be:

The change that took most time to discuss and actually experiment with is not in the rules: changing the colors of the blue uniforms and the blue goal. It turned out that the improvement was not worth the effort required (i.e. new uniforms), especially in possibly the last year of the AIBO-based Four-Legged League.

Prelim List of Interested RoboCup 2007 teams

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Here is a list released today of all teams that have ‘expressed their intention of participation’ for RoboCup 2007 in Atlanta. There are 27 teams total (though some teams may be omitted due to spam filters!).

– Impossibles Team
– Team ARAIBO
– Dutch Aibo Team
– UTAustinVilla
– TJArk
– Team Chaos
– The-CAT
– CMDash
– Microsoft Hellhounds
– NUbots
– SpelBots
– UChile
– WrightEagle
– ISocRob 4LL team
– Hamburg Dog Bots
– Twaves
– TecRams
– Northern Bites
– Cerberus
– GermanTeam
– Eagle Knights
– Brown University
– LTU Blue Devils
– Kouretes
– MetroBots
– DEN-INU
– SPQRLegged

Notable absences:

–rUNSWift. Second place finisher from last year. Looks like William Uther, rUNSWift’s leader, one of the main organizers from last year, and one of the dominant forces in RoboCup since its inception, will not be entering his team for another year. I had a chance to talk to Will last year in Bremen and the word was that 2006 was his last year at RoboCup because the organization he worked for was shifting priorities. Sadly, at least from this list, it looks like that fate came true.
–UPenn. I had heard through the grapevine that their participation this year was not certain. David Cohen, their student captain, graduated from UPenn last spring. Here’s hoping that their name was inadvertently forgotten on this list and that participate this year.

Notable additions:
–CMDash. They qualified but didn’t compete last year in Bremen. This year, the word is that they are going to give it a real go for the last (potentially) year of the four-legged league. Awesome.
–MetroBots, LTU Blue Devils, Brown University : three US teams who weren’t in Bremen last year and want to come to Atlanta this year. I suppose the proximity doesn’t hurt!

We shall see how the list shapes up. 27 teams applying and 24 slots means that there will be a lot fewer pissed off teams who don’t qualify. Also, it gives us, a second-year team, a better shot than last year, where 35 teams applied for 27 spots (I just checked the number). The downside of fewer teams applying tells me that some teams don’t have enough Aibos functioning, have moved onto newer, more exciting robot platforms, or simply have just lost their interest in the four-legged league.

The 2007 Rules were supposed to be announced today — I am really looking forward to see them — but I’ve seen no announcement. Hopefully they’ll come soon, as well as the announcement of the 2007 challenges, of which we want to spend a lot of time on this year.

4-Legged Demonstration, Microsoft

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Here’s an announcement I missed announcing Microsoft’s sponsorship of RoboCup 2007 and news that there will be a demonstration of new 4-legged league candidate robots in Atlanta.

Microsoft’s foray into this RoboCup is to show off their software package Robotics Studio. I haven’t read much about it but it sounds interesting. Also, Bill Gates has made some posturing talk towards robotics interest for Microsoft. Of course, Microsoft has sponsored Dortmund University’s team for many years and we saw lots of Microsoft representation and people at RoboCup 2006 in Germany.

As for the new 4-legged league announcement, it says that the “winning robot hardware platforms” will be showed off. Here’s hoping that the interest from robotics companies is high and the field (beyond of course the inevitably kick-ass NUBot platform) is formidable.

PCAR 2006

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PCAR 2006 is a ‘International Symposium on Practical Cognitive Agents and Robots’ that was held very recently in Perth, Australia.

One of the invited speakers was 4-Legged League Technical Committe Advisory Member Masahiro Fujita, who also happens to be the literal god of the Sony robots Aibo and Qrio.

Our good friend Michael Quinlan and his NUBot teammates presented a paper entitled ‘Impact of Tactical Variations in the RoboCup Four-Legged League’. Also, Kai Xu, a new technical committee member this year for the 4-Legged league and captain of China’s WrightEagle, went and presented ‘Legged Robot Gait Locus Generation Based on Genetic Algorithms’. Both papers sound interesting and I’d love to get a copy of them.

To top it off, they held an ‘exhibition’ of 4-Legged teams squaring off against each other. Sadly, the reigning champion NUBots did not participate but WrightEagle, UTS Unleashed, and a new team from Australia, the UWArriors from the University of of Western Australia. If someone who attended should stumble upon this page, please let us know how the exhibition went. It’s never too early to start scouting for RoboCup 2007.

GermanOpen 2007: Call for Pre-Registration

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Just announced today: The GermanOpen 2007 will be held in Hannover over April 16-21. Apparently the event will be held in ‘the world’s largest industrial fair’. That’s pretty cool. The event will be hosting lots of other leagues beyond our own, and I found this little note particularly interesting:

The RoboCupJunior competition in Hannover is restricted to German teams. They have to qualify for participation in the RoboCup German Open in regional events held in Magdeburg (February, 23rd-25th) and Vöhringen (March, 2nd-4th). Details and a call for participation for these qualifying events will be issued separately.

They are serious about their RoboCupJunior in Germany. And I’m not a hater at all–RoboCupJunior was the sole reason I stayed sane throughout the entire RoboCup 2006. Especially the Dancing.

UPDATE::link above re-linked to English version, linked in the Links section to your right as well.