The third day at RoboCup at Suntec City began at Toys ‘R Us instead of the usual open competition field at the Convention Halls 4 and 6. This is the first time Home segment judges decided to test service robots in a real world location.
Everyone began craning their heads from outside the glass display window to catch a glimpse of Digoro
while he cruised through the aisles, mapping and registering different sections in the store. The eR@sers from Tamagawa University in Japan created Digoro to compete and maintain the championship, which they have done for 8 years till Germany stole it in 2008. They reclaimed it only last year and wishes to do so for 2010. But we speak to the German team for NimbRo the robot.
“At sight, it may seem far from application as yet, but it may be a new market in the near future as I foresee,” Joerg states. NimbRo completed the entire phase for the open challenge in the shopping mall smoothly.
When asked what made him so interested in robotics whilst pursuing his PhD in Computer Science, he said, “The idea was to do something that fascinates you. I wanted to not only do programming and implementing algorithms, but do something in the physical world and be useful in application, like helping people in housework and increasing their life spans.”
Following the Germans to the humanoid soccer for adult-sized robots, it was a close fight between the Japanese’s Tsinghua Hephaestus team and NimbRo, another soccer bot team. After the half hour match, Marcell Missura tells us more about their two-member robot team.
“Our robots are for research purposes as well as for playing soccer,” he says plainly with a smile.
Their goalkeeper has been in use since 2007 and simply makes a fall to the left or right when it senses the ball coming too close. The striker bot would first locate the ball, then if it senses any obstacle or opponent near, it would avoid or repel from it and be driven towards the goal away from the opponent. Of course, to get the robot into motion looks more complicated than it sounds.
Marcell says he took on the task of fixing up bigger robots instead of the smaller-sized humanoids because the ‘robots needed to be bigger to perform in our era’, especially when we are geared toward playing in the human World Cup in 2050! Marcell is also studying his 2nd year in Computer Science and chose robotics as ‘they were complicated; having to programme the machines to move and much more’ was what drew him.
