Australia looks to add to robot soccer silverware Thursday, 27 July 2017

Australian roboticists and artificial intelligence experts are getting ready to mix it with the world's best at RoboCup 2017 starting today in Nagoya, Japan.

RoboCup involves a number of different competitions, many of them involving some form of robot soccer, but also including logistics and warehousing, disaster rescue, and assisting people in domestic situations.

In the Standard Platform League, which involves teams of six NAO robots playing soccer, Australia will be represented by teams from the University of NSW and Griffith University.

“This year we’ve enhanced our ‘walk engine’, which was the key to wins in 2014 and 2015, and which other teams later copied,” said UNSW team leader Hayden Smith.

“We’ve also overhauled our vision system, which is what let us down last year in Leipzig. Coupled with improvements in localisation and some other fancy behavioural coding, we hope to be a contender in Nagoya.”

Two Australian teams will compete in the RoboCup@Home League which simulates robots performing domestic operations such as for opening and closing doors and holding objects. A UNSW team will compete i the Domestic Standard Platform category while a team from the University of Technology, Sydney will compete in the Social Standard Platform.

Another competition held in conjunction with RoboCup is the Amazon Robotics Challenge where robots muct identify items and retrieve them. Teams from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Smart Robotics with the University of Sydney will compete with fourteen other teams for a prize pool of US$250,000.

“You won’t believe how hard is it to teach a robot to see a clear bottle of water among a bunch of groceries, or teach it the best way to pick up a bag of marbles," said QUT team leader Dr Juxi Leitner.

“Our robot has a vision system to recognise specific items in a crowded container, and a mechanical system to retrieve and stow that item into a shipping box."

A number of schools are in Nagoya as well. Christ Church Grammar School in Perth and St Francis Xavier College in Canberra both have teams competing in the Rapidly Manufactured Robot League which sees teams simulate a first responder rescue situation, where the robot is sent into a disaster situation before human rescuers and must navigate a range of standard terrains. The St George Christian School from Sydney is competing in the RoboCup Junior rescue competition.

A group of Year 9 boys from Central Coast Grammar School from Erina, NSW has a team in the OnStage competition which tests creativity and artistic sense.

Brisbane Boys College is competing in the Lightweight Secondary category of the RoboJunior soccer competition while Scots College in Sydney has a team in the Open category.

[The UNSW RoboCup soccer team. Photo: UNSW]