Humanoid Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament (HuroCup)
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Humanoid Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament (HuroCup) |
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A team of staff and students of the Faculty of Technology took part in the 10 day EUROBY’2008 robotic competition held in Switzerland and Austria to coincide with the Euro 2008 Football competition.
They competed in the Hurosot category for Humanoid robots of less than 50cm height. The competition included the sprint, obstacle run, weight lifting, basket ball and penalty kick. These challenges are set by the organisers to develop the necessary skills for an eventual full football match between robots and humans.
The Plymouth robot did particularly well in sprint, beating the world record holder in the first out of three races (video 9MB) (Youtube). This was due to the development of a novel dynamic gait. The team produced a spectacular penalty kick applauded by other competitors and the crowd. However, due to the robot still being in a development stage, Plymouth did not enter all competitions and finished 5th in the overall contest. I should be noted that Plymouth was the only European team competing in the Hurosot category, making England the de-facto European Hurosot Champion.
Plymouth II RoboCrouch preparing for a penalty kick.
The team comprised Dr Guido Bugmann, Reader in Intelligent Systems, Peter Gibbons, PhD student in Robotics, Axel Voitier, Gregory Skaltsas and Thomas Tsimos, 3 students from the MSc Robotics conducting projects on humanoid robotics. The team also benefited from the ground work done towards previous competitions by PhD student Joerg Wolf, lecturer Paul Robinson and Phil Hall, a private contributor. Our technical support teams in electronics and mechanics played a key role.
The robot is fully autonomous, using a camera and a new processor board built in-house around the Colibri XScale PXA270, which packs in a few centimetre squares the computing power of desktop PCs of only a few years ago.
This processor is at the heart of a new humanoid robot developed by a team of people, led by Dr. Phil Culverhouse, for teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level. The new robot will allow studying human-robot interaction as well as developing skills relevant to domestic applications.
Plymouth has made a strategic decision to introduce humanoid robotics in its teaching and the participation in competitions is an effective method for developing skills and testing knowledge in that field.
The 2008 team, working on the robot at the location of the marathon race.
GB- 03.07.2008