Australia has smashed its way into the RoboCup world soccer finals, with a UNSW student team now facing off against an elite team from Germany to secure the world title later today.
Wilson da Silva
Faculty of Engineering
+61 (0)2 9385 0801
w.dasilva@unsw.edu.au
Australia has smashed its way into the RoboCup world soccer finals, with a UNSW student team now facing off against an elite team from Germany to secure the world title later today.
Five UNSW students and alumni are in Hefei, west of Shanghai in China, for the RoboCup World Championship 2015. There are five robots a side competing in the do-or-die final tonight, and the ‘UNSW Australia’ team is up against ‘B-Human’, a joint squad from DFKI (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence) and the elite University of Bremen.
One of the UNSW's Nao robots competing at the RoboCup World Championship 2015 in Hefei, China.
“I think it’s going to be a really close game,” says team leader Sean Harris, a PhD student with UNSW’s School of Computer Science and Engineering, speaking from Hefei.
“They’ve been our arch-rivals for five years now, they’ve always been in the top 3 and always a very strong team. Last year we beat them 5-0 in the semi-finals, but they are a lot stronger now,” he added. “We’re definitely nervous to play them.”
RoboCup is an international competition that fosters advances in robotics and artificial intelligence. The premier category is the Standard Platform League, in which squads compete on an indoor soccer court with identical robots operating entirely autonomously. This year’s final is being fought with the Nao series, a 58-cm humanoid robot produced by Aldebaran Robotics in France.
Because there is no external control – by humans or computers – the teams have to rely on the programming and self-governing software algorithms the teams have developed over the past year to win the game.
“There’s nothing we can change now, there’s no pep talk we can give them,” says Harris. “Whatever we’ve done over the last 12 months determines what happens next. They’re fully autonomous, so there’s nothing we can do – which is actually really hard. All we can do is get them ready for a game.:
The UNSW team entered the finals following a convincing 6-1 win against the University of Chile in the semi-finals, and a 7-0 against Taiwan’s NTU RoboPAL from National Taiwan University. “We were pretty well in control of the game, and never really looked like losing,” says Harris.
The UNSW student team at the RoboCup World Championship 2015 in Hefei, China.
The final began at 12:30pm AEST (Sydney time) and a result will be known by 1:30pm AEST. And awards ceremony will be held in Hefei at 6pm AEST