Wednesday

An exceptionally early start today - have to be in the Convention Centre for an 8 o'clock set-up. At first were optimistic; the run of the robots seems to show them making good progress, deploying in a line out into the virtual office building that they are meant to be exploring. Later analysis however says that the robots lost communication, and we are marked down; now no chance of gaining a trophy. We're sad and frustrated at this; there's been a lot of preparation gone into this competition, and we so wanted to do better than last year.

On reflection, however, our issues with the inter-robot communications might well reflect the sorts of problems that real robots and radios might well have in a disaster situation. We've got used to instant mobile telephone communications that work well for most of the time, but amongst a tangled mass of steel and rubble that is a collapsed building the way that data signals propagate and fade is complex and difficult to predict. What that means is that our mechanisms for controlling the robots has to take this uncertainty into account; a message that we might well have continued to miss by studying the problem only in the abstract, and a good reason for competitions like RoboCup to exist.

Manage to get around and see a little more today. At a National Committees meeting we are told that there about 2800 (human) participants at this RoboCup. Of this the total UK participation is around 50, and that mainly in the Junior competitions. It seems the rest of the world can see the value of events such as these, but we struggle to do so. Oh, well.

The legged robots have improved tremendously since my last RoboCup, but are still clearly comical to the non-expert eye. Two little girls don't mind though; they sit talking to the NAO robots, patting them, asking them to play. These robots have voice command recognition, but are not very used to oriental accents it seems. In frustration she finally tries "play soccer, PLEASE". She is finally taken away, but not until she has given one a hug.

Tuesday

Days at RoboCup tend to follow a simple pattern: get up, take the metro a few stops from the apartment we're sharing this week into the Suntec Convention centre downtown; and re-appear into the warm Singapore evening around 12 hours later. Yesterday we had a number of technical problems as our computer programs struggled to maintain contact with the robots in the virtual disaster areas that had been set up by the organisers. All very frustrating; but strangely, an excellent illustration of why we should do this. In a real disaster situation the radio links between the robot operators and the robots are just as likely to be unreliable, and it would be vital that there is enough resiliance in the overall man-machine interface to cope.

Anyhow, yesterday Okke managed to get us to 3rd place overall despite the problems. Today it's Helen's turn to be in the driving seat. The communications with the robots crash completely early on in the run, but as other teams are having problems as well we're still in the running.

Meanwhile I managed to take a little time to look around at the other things going on. Some of the @Home robots look a little strange (see below). They respond to voice commands, so can be sent through a `home' in the corner of the arena to fetch things. The wheeled soccer robots are typified by the small-sized ones here; they are now very fast and agile, and watching them play you can certainly see the skill involved, although I do wonder though whether they are following an evolutionary dead-end with those wheels! For practical reasons the real robots competitons are played with a limited number of players, but in the 2D simulation league they can easily run 11-a-side competitions, and the play is smooth, fast, and skillful. The same can't yet be said for the humanoid leagues - still the robots spend a lot of time picking themselves up - but they are improving.

Monday

Monday has been the first competition day here in Singapore. Our table, where we are based, is quite central in the main hall so we can hear the noises from most of the different events going on. To one side we have the rescue robot demonstration area, which is where the real prototype robots are put through their paces through several maze-like areas, looking for dummies. (This year they even have a car there, complete with baby dolls inside waiting to be rescued!). On another side are the @Home robots; these are generally a wheeled platform, with a 'friendly' face and a robot arm, designed to interact with humans in a home setting. Finally, in the other half of the hall there are the football-playing robots; as predicted in my blog from two years ago (robocup2008-oxford.blogspot.com) the number of humanoid robots competing has increased (at the expense of the wheeled robots), and although far from perfect they are continuing to improve.

Introduction

We've come to RoboCup in Singapore for the annual `world championships' in many things robotic. RoboCup was originally conceived to push the state-of-the-art in robotics, computing and engineering through the medium of getting robots to play football; however over the last decade it has broadened out to other robot-related activities. Nowadays RoboCup is split into 4 broad areas: education, soccer, rescue, and @Home. Education is a big theme: getting young people interested in the science behind robotics, by getting them to build and intract with them. About a half of the 3000 participants here are in the `Junior' section, and most of those coming singly or in teams with robots that they have built themselves.

The other participants are `majors' - typically from university research teams - working within the other 3 areas in a competitive setting and generating new science at the same time. In turn, about half of the major participants are working on various aspects of football, which is based on a mixture of simulated and real robots, some of which have wheels and some legs. The `rescue' theme is based on the idea of using robots to help out after a major disaster, and @home with ways of maing robots more useful in a home environment.

Our team is called the "Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces", or AOJRF for short, and works on one aspect of the rescue problem. Presently after a disaster like an earthquake human responders have to first explore looking for survivors, which is a risky business in itself, and so some researchers are building prototype robots whose descendants may one day be sent in to so the looking instead. What we do instead is to develop the software for these future robots, which can then be used to help design them as well. (No point building a robot it's so complicated that you can't write the software programs to drive it.)

The way the competitions are organised in our league - the Virtual Rescue Robot league - is that the organisers construct a set of virtual worlds, which the competitiors have to explore against the clock. Points are awarded against a number of factors such as accuracy and usefulness of the computerised maps that are generated as our (virtual) robots explore. Spectators can watch the progress unfold on a `big screen', which gives a birds-eye view of the progress while one human operator tries to control the robots using only the views from those.

AOJRF consists of 4 people this year, namely myself, Okke Formsma from Amsterdam, and Helen Flynn and Victor Spirin from Oxford. Thanks to the internet we're also assisted by a couple of people back home; Julian de Hoog in Oxford and Arnoud Visser in Amsterdam. There's also a fifth member of the group, Jie Ma from Oxford, who is on the Organising Coimmittee and is helping to run a couple of the football competitions. We've all arrived in Singapore over the last few days, and have been getting ready for the first full day on competition on Monday. The picture above shows Helen, Okke and Victor at our table, with some of the hundreds of other RoboCup participants behind them.