Postscript

RoboCup finished on the Thursday with a big buffet dinner - an odd occasion, with 1400 people milling around trying out the different food (Singapore is a melting pot of cuisines). Meanwhile various groups of locals - mainly students - had been roped in to provide the entertainment, with dancing from the traditional to the very modern. (The Junior attendees had their own party this time. I guess this was due to the shear numbers involved, but again I think that this enforced separation was unfortunate.)

RoboCup is an intriguing event. As I've mentioned before, there's nothing like the competition setting for putting onto us all the sorts of pressure our robots and systems might need to put up with if they are to be deployed for real. The Junior events are also great for getting young people enthused about science and technology in general.

The RoboCup Foundation - who oversee all this stuff - clearly are concerned of the size of this event, and with reason. Their response is to try to put more importance onto the regional events. For us in the UK, that mainly means the German Open event, and also the Iranian Open, both of which are held in the spring. (It might come as a surprise to hear how big RoboCup is in Iran. I don't know why this is, but they seem to have taken it to their hearts!) There's also going to be a small RoboCup event in Wales in August, as part of the National Eisteddfod, which we'll be helping with!

As I say, the Iranians were in Singapore in force. The other country to dominate the proceedings were the Chinese. Not that we should be really surprised that the country containing a quarter of the world's population should do well, but it certainly means that the rest of us have to look out in future!

Thursday

A fairly quiet day for us; we are not in the Finals. (We end up in 4th place; not too shabby, but not as good as last year.) So at last I'm able to have a good look around!

Have a look upstairs, where the Junior section is. Rather dismayed to find that the security up there is quite strict, and I'm not allowed to get too close to the robots that the Juniors (i.e., teenagers and younger) have created; apparently they don't want any of their `mentors' giving them too much help. Personally I think that's a great pity; I've always got a real buzz from seeing what the youngsters have managed to come up with.
Also up there are the `middle-sized' wheeled robots (in the `Major' section). Despite the name these are quite large - dustbin sized - and amazing pieces of engineering, capable of performing chip shots over the heads of other robots towards goals. Can't help thinking that they're an evolutionary dead-end though...

Back downstairs and the final competitions are underway. The Standard Platform League competition uses a common commercial robot called the NAO - the type the little girls were talking to yesterday. People who don't understand how difficult it is to get a legged robot to move - let alone play football - are often underwhelmed by how these little white robots are moving, but I'm impressed on how fast the progress is with them. Nonetheless, they do spend quit a bit of time on their backs. Meanwhile Jie has been running the 3D simulated football competition, which runs with simulated NAOs. The idea is that the simulation people can focus on building up strategies, while the real robot people sort out the engineering aspects. Jie is quite chuffed when Team Apollo clinch the first prize; he was with that team before he came to Oxford.

Over at the Robot Rescue arena the big rescue robots are going through their paces. Again there has been considerable progress with the design and implementation of these over the last couple of years. The vehicles tend to be variations on a design which has a number of tracks on the bottom for scrambling over stuff, and a set of cameras on a robot arm on the top. The robots are controlled by an operator who only sees what the cameras show him (or her), plus the output of a laser range-finder. They are certainly making quite a lot of noise as they crash around the arena - and they are managing to get around and over the 'rubble' (actually blocks of wood) that have been laid out to try to slow them down. When they get to where they have to go, the robot arm come out, and they get a nice picture or two of the 'victims'.

The thing that is really striking this year are the Home Robots. There are many contenders here for this competition, some looking downright weird. Again there is a basic form for the robots that most adhere to; a tracked or wheeled robot base to move the thing around, with a post coming out to hold a robot head and two arms at a height so that the robot can `look' at faces. They use voice recognition for commands and a laser range-finder to accurately measure distances, and their arms to do useful stuff. During the competition each robot is introduced into a `home scene' containing some humans to serve and is given some task to do; marks are given for speed of operation, and for `effectiveness' (which is a rather difficult thing to quantify). The competition are held in an environment which is vaguely split into a number of `rooms' (e.g., bedroom; kitchen), and with a number of pieces of furniture that an army of human helpers change around at regular intervals. What is certainly missing are changes in level; I guess that that's reasonable, as they want to focus on how to operate robots in a home environment, rather than on legged locomotion.

The finalists in the home robot competition at least don't look too scary. The Gadget Show - a very popular UK TV show - are there filming, with one of the hosts (Jon Bentley) acting as one of the judges (below). He seems particularly puzzled by why the robot builders are proud of their robot's face recognition technology. (I guess that it's a technology that has rapidly moved into consumer programs like iTunes, while the roboticists have focused on getting the rest of their robot to work.) Most of the robots manage to get a bottle of beer out of a fridge - possibly with a little help from their minders - and place it on a table. One of the most striking of the robots reminds be of the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz; colourful and friendly looking, with a habit of fixing its gaze on whoever is speaking. These little touches may seem peculiar, but are thought to be the sort of mannerisms that will be required before we accept robots as our `friends'.

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.