UK RoboCup 2011 Hopes Thwarted

Following the example set by their human counterparts, UK's best robotic footballers too have bombed out of the football World Cup. It was the country's first full team taking part in the 2011 RoboCup in Istanbul over the weekend.

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The RoboCup 2011 Mascot

Lamentably, the four-strong Ed-inferno squad from Edinburgh University, was knocked out in the group levels. The team's coach consecrated to comeback next year with a much better team. Dr Subramanian Ramamoorthy, assistant professor at the School of Informatics, felt that the lack of success was largely due to the fact that the UK has no national RoboCup tournament at which Edinferno could fine tune their hardware, software and strategy. He said, "Almost all the bugs that stopped us were because we were not match ready." By contrast, added Dr Ramamoorthy, opposing teams had taken part in their respective national tournaments and honed their players and team work before reaching the final in Turkey. "I suspect we are one of the few that are here for their first year," he said. In spite of getting knocked out of the tournament in the earlier stages itself, Dr Ramamoorthy said Edinferno had fulfilled many of its goals. "Until this year there was no British team," he said. "And we learned that our core technology is not that bad even though we have not been very successful."

Edinferno participated in the Stanford Platform League of the RoboCup which ensures ll teams use bipedal robots made by French firm Aldebaran Robotics. Similarly, four other leagues covering software-only simulated soccer as well as small, medium and humanoid teams of robots. The RoboCup is the largest assembly of robots on the planet.

Organizer of the RoboCup, Dr Cetin Mericli, said the event initiated in 1997 right after chess grand master Garry Kasparov was beaten by the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer. Football was decided as a "grand challenge" to focus the research efforts of robot makers and AI experts so the machines they produce get more competent. He said it gave them a benchmark against which to measure their progress and that the issues that need to be resolved to make a good team of football-playing robots are significant to the many areas of human life that those thinking machines will have to tackle when they live and work alongside us. He said, "We want to create robots that are intelligent enough to take care of themselves and to take care of anyone around them so they can be part of our lives."

According to Dr Mericli, this competition will mark the production of smarter robots,  because the rules governing the competitions regularly had to be revised as the machines and their creators got better at walking, recognising objects, avoiding collisions and working together. Pitches were now larger, teams had more number of players and landmarks to help with navigation were being removed as the robots got smarter and played better.

The ultimate objective of having this RoboCup is to produce a team that, by 2050 at the latest, can take on and beat the most recent human Fifa World Cup winning team. Dr Ramamoorthy is in no doubt its a reachable goal. "I think we could get there," he said. "We can make robots that can win that game as all the pieces are here. However, if we did get there, the result would not be just about football. If you had robots that could win that game they would be useful for so many other things."