Throughout Hollywood’s history robots have been depicted in movies and TV shows doing extraordinary things with unique and complex capabilities. For example, this summer ABC brought back the robot competition show entitled “Battlebots” which originally aired on Comedy Central 12 years ago. In this competition, teams build small robots that can attack their competitor’s robot in a glass dome arena. The last robot standing and still functioning is the winner. This season “BattleBots” averaged 4.6 million viewers with a demographic of watchers between the ages of 18 – 49 years old. With millions watching robots demolishing each just for fun, imagine the possibility of robots competing against each other or possibly humans in sports. Well, this is precisely what is going on and the future goal of the Robot World Cup Initiative better known as “Robocup”.
Robocup’s first competition was held in Nagaya, Japan in 1997 and this year’s competition was held in Hefei, China. More than 40 countries are represented at Robocup and this year’s competition had over 400 participants ranging from engineers, professors, and students. The object of this competition is quite simple; it wants to promote robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) around the world through research, innovation, and fun. Robocup knows that this might not have an affect socially or economically but through sports, specifically soccer they believe they can bring more interest and awareness to science and technology. One company spreading awareness is ASIMO which demonstrated the human like functions of their robot by running, jumping, and kicking a soccer ball to U.S. President Barack Obama in Japan in 2014.
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Robocup has five leagues of play with the most popular and most challenging technically being the Humanoid League, where the robots most resemble human anatomy. Each robot must have two legs, two arms, one head and a trunk. A robot is considered not capable of play if it cannot stand and walk. Within the humanoid league there are three subleagues of robots that can be used for play: Kid size, Teen size, and Adult size robots. Kids size competition allows for 4 v. 4 robots and Teen and Adults size are 2 v. 2 where one robot can be designated as the goalie.
There are many rules and regulations for the humanoid leagues. Criteria include size and weight of the robot and the size of the goal. Kid size robots are approximately 1-2 feet in height. Teen sizes are approximately 2-4 feet and Adults are approximately 4-5 feet. Teens have a max weight of 44 Ibs and adults have a minimal weight of 22 lbs. The field that the robots play on is approximately 30 feet in length and approximately 20 feet in width. The cost to create these robots averages around $50,000 t0 $100,000.
Each match consists of two 10 minutes periods with up to a 5 minute half time. During the first part of the tournament there is a round robin style feature where every team plays against each team once. During this round judges are looking for different skill sets in which teams can earn points. They are ranked on robustness, walking abilities, ball handling abilities, and other soccer like skills. After the teams play a second round of round robin they are then entered into the final playoff round which is knock out or single elimination style. The objective is the same as any other soccer game. The team with the most goals wins.
This year’s winner of the 2015 Robocup was the robot Thor, short for Thorwin. Students from UCLA and University of Pennsylvania assembled this robot, which had previously won DARPA Robotic Challenge, which is a competition for robots in disasters and rescue simulations. Thor beat the team from Tehran’s Baset Robot Laboratory, 5-4, to take home the trophy they can only keep for a year until the next winner receives it.
In the future Robocup wants to challenge engineers to create robots that will be able to fill a whole team roster and compete against humans. Their goal is to have human like robots by the year 2050. Until then Robots have been seen not only playing soccer but playing ping pong and working with the armed forces in fighting fires and rescuing wounded soldiers.