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.