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.