3 Sleeps ’till Robocup Singapore
After several months of hard work, we’re ready and set for the Robocup World Championships and Conference at the Singapore Suntec Convention Centre.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Robocup SPL, it is a competition consisting of 24 teams from universities around the world, who program the Aldebaran Nao humanoid robot to play soccer autonomously. The robot must identify objects in its environment, plan how it should react to the world in coordination with its team-mates, and execute those actions (such as walking and kicking) quickly and correctly. Our team, rUNSWift is described in this poster:
When we arrive in Singapore on Friday evening, we have one and a half days to calibrate our robots and software for the specific environmental peculiarities of the Suntec Convention Centre, before our first game which is a demonstration match for the opening ceremony. On Monday, we will play in the 1st pool round against two other teams:
Austin Villa
The team from the University of Texas, Austin are the champions from this year’s US Open and semi-finalists from last year’s World Championships in Graz, Austria. They’re notorious for having a diving goalie, which will prove a worthy challenge in this opening round.
BURST
This team is relatively new to the SPL league, but are not to be trifled with, they outperformed rUNSWift significantly in the 2009 competition, despite that being their first year participating, and the only Israeli team to have ever competed in a senior Robocup tournament. According to their team description paper, their research this year is focusing on machine-learning for walking and kicking as well as high end behavioural systems, while they using an augmented version of the code from the B-Human 2009 release for vision and localisation.
After the 1st pool round, we will either proceed directly to the 2nd pool round if we place 1st in our pool, or play in an intermediate round if we rank 2nd or 3rd. The quarter-finals take place on Wednesday and the semi and grand finals are on Thursday. The hot favourite for this year are B-Human, who won the competition last year, and also won this year’s German Open. We’re hoping to give them a run for their money.
This year rUNSWift has gone for a complete re-write of our software architecture, they key features being:
- An omni-directional walk significantly faster than the standard AL walk
- A hybrid Kalman-filter/Particle-filter system for localisation
- A Python-C++ mapping layer to allow for the rapid development of high-level behaviours
- A powerful suite of diagnostic and testing utilities, that allow most hardware and software glitches to be picked up at runtime, and often repaired
Watch this space for videos of set-up and games from Singapore over the coming days. In the mean time here’s a trailer for Robocup Singapore:
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