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.