From: Alejandro Dubrovsky (s335984@student.uq.edu.au)
Date: Mon Sep 04 2000 - 02:55:28 MDT
oh well, too late now. i was in melbourne all of last week. checked out
robocup on monday and tuesday for more than 8 hours each day, skipped it on
wednesday to recover, and for some reason or other, i completely missed out
on the finals (well, i went on sunday but got there at 3:30pm, after they
had finished). i did manage to see every team in the big league and quite a
number on the others so i wasn't too upset. the robots were mostly not that
impressive although there were lots of cool things to note. the winners of
the small robot division (cornell university) were quite good, controlling
and kicking the ball with a spininning roller pin, going around other
robots, shooting for the clearest bit of goal, and even passing the ball
among robots (only team i saw doing that in an obviously non-accidental
way). the larger division seemed to be quite a bit slower and dumber, and
there was constant human intervention (going into the court to adjust
alignments, taking robots out, putting them back in). the aibo programming
didn't seem very impressive either but i was quite impressed by the aibos
themselves. i did miss out on the biped demo, did anyone catch any of that?
i was surprised by the amount of countries represented, and especially by
the very strong iranian showing (quarters on the simulation league,
defending champions on the big league, third this year and quite unlucky at
that, and developers of the coolest maneouvre on the big league division
(they had this "orbit-the-ball" movement which looked great and was a huge
tactical advantage)). One very dissapointing feature of the cup was the
amount of focus on the competitiveness of the event, rather than in the
technology. There were constantly arguments about rules and complaints for
charges, and 5-second violations (they were quite modified soccer rules),
especially from english-speaking countries (i suppose because they could),
and lots of overheard conversations and jokes on getting a glimpse at each
other's codes as if there were some major research secret in those robots.
The simulation league was completely the opposite in this matter, since
everyone had to show their code. It was also much more impressive from a
soccer perspective (very realistic looking matches went on there)
All in all, not too bad, especially the atmosphere of the place (hundreds of
robots in one place, lots of constant tweaking and adjusting), but not much
in the technological news front.
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