Thursday 17th

Another prompt start, and today I've not got away from the simulation
area at all. Jie's two teams are both looking at slightly different
aspects of robot football. The `2D' game simulates wheeled robots:
this type of robot is pretty straightforward to build, and to
simulate; but not having legs makes it awkward to control a football!
Nevertheless it's been a good test-bed for thinking in particular
about how the individual robots can be programmed to act like a team.
Early examples of robot football looked like a joke; team members
would regularly crash into goals, walls, and even players from their
own team. Now in this simulation league we see games with 11 players
a side and some reasonably fluid movement of the ball from player to
player, and the hope soon is to try to move these team strategies onto
the physical robots that those researchers who are better at building
robots are building.

The `3D' simulation is relatively new, and it introduces a humanoid
model, based on a new, mass-produced robot called the NAO. So far
here - and like with the real robots - the main challenge has been to
keep the robots upright. Jie has had a hard day of it today, trying
to make sure that both his 2D and 3D teams are ready for real
competition. He's built up these teams alone; many of the teams that
he is competing against have between 4-10 people working on them.
Despite that, we are all very happy when he makes it into the next
round tomorrow for both of his teams, so ranking him overall among the
best 8 and 16 within the 2D and 3D leagues.

We've also met up with some more of the British participants here.
There's a very strong British contingent within the Junior leagues
with 10 teams from the UK, and we've met some of the teachers and
helpers involved. One common theme is how we can use the ideas from
some of the RoboCup competitions to maybe help enthuse British school
children towards science and technology. RoboCup Junior is already
doing this to some extent, but the number of qualified helpers who are
currently working to do this in the field is small. Can those of us
working now working in the Senior leagues do something to help this
along? It's an interesting question, and we'll continue this
discussion both here and when we get back home. We've also made
contact with the only other British team competing in the Senior
competition, namely with Gopal Ramhurn from Southampton, competing in
RoboCup Rescue.

There are a couple of new groups sharing the Simulation part of the
Hall. One is a Microsoft-sponsored area, promoting the use of their
new Robotics Platform. (They'll be a presentation from Microsoft
about that on Saturday.) The other is the `mixed-reality' league,
which uses tiny wheeled robots from Citizen, running on a small
surface (or plasma screen, like in the picture below). Being so small
the robots can't push very much at all, so instead the ball is
virtual, and is simulated within the computer program. The idea is
that, by using a real robot, programmers in this league have to take
into account the surprises that real life throws at us. (So, for
example, real robots never go exactly to where you tell them to go.)
On the other hand, the set-up is small and relatively cheap, and so
more accessible. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how
practical it will turn out to be.

The final news of the day is that Julian has made it through the
preliminary rounds for his RoboCup rescue competition; and so the team
he is running (jointly with the University of Amsterdam) will get
through to the next round. Leave the centre around 10, and back to
the apartment after another busy and tiring day.