Wednesday 16th

A good nights sleep and my first proper day in China. We grabbed some
breakfast and a cab, and were in the Expo Centre before 9. Jie and
Julian went straight to their respective desks and started to get
their programs ready for the day's play; I took the opportunity to
look around the Hall a little.



Each of the RoboCup disciplines have their own area of the Hall. As
you walk into the Hall you see the main stage, which is used for the
few official ceremonies and the robot/human dance events. To the
right is the simulation area where we are situated; only some very
small robots here, and otherwise a computer geek's paradise with rows
of desks, network connections, and at the front some seats and
big-screen projectors so the audience can see what's going on as the
games are played inside the virtual world of the computer. Behind
that is where the Junior games are played, based on robot rescue,
football, and dance. On the other side of the Hall you get the main
real robot competitions, based on several different designs and sizes
of robot.

The most striking thing this morning is the number of children around
the place. School teams have come to participate from all over the
world; as you might expect there are many from the Far East, but it
still seems like every continent (other than Antartica) is well
represented. Then there are all the Chinese school parties coming in
to spectate, in their well-ordered lines and yelps of joy when they see
the robots.

This first morning I'm focusing more on the Junior area, after a
quick look at some of the humanoid robots. The humonoid robots are the
first step within RoboCup towards robots that can move around like
humans can, but they are still relatively clumsy. All of them often
fall down, and the first thing they have to be taught is how to pick
themselves up again! But over the last couple of years `cheap'
mass-produced humnoid robots have become available, and this has
democratised the work on humanoid motion from being something that the
fortunate few engaged in to something that almost anybody can attempt.
Right now, the robot are being adjusted, ready for their serious work
later.

Around the Junior area there are many excited children warming up (and a few
young adults). The key idea is for the children to build up some kit
robots, and they are all proudly adjusting and testing their
creations. The robot dancers in particular are being dressed in all
their finery; the idea here is that they put on a good and artistic
display. Junior soccer uses a simplified one-on-one soccer arena, and
the games are already underway, with lots of cheers and groans from the
robot creators and the spectators.

Robocup rescue is a discipline with the eventual aim of being able to
build robotic devices that might be useful in a disaster situation.
For example, after an earthquake or a terrorist attack one issue to
confront rescuers is where to direct their scarce resources. There
have already been a few uses of simple robotic devices in this sort of
situation, in which a remote-controlled buggy is sent on the end of a
wire into an area of interest by remote control. If the operator
detects a casualty them the human rescuers can start digging; and if
the roof falls in and destroys the robot then that's sad, but much
better than losing a human rescuer. Robocup rescue is still at an
early stage of development, and in the Senior leagues is split between
the `engineering' problems of building useful robots that can actually
get in and do useful work without getting trapped, and a simulation
activity which use the core of a computer game program to design a
virtual disaster area for the simulated robots to explore. (The
former is more realistic, but using the latter allows almost anybody
to make a contribution to our knowledge of what to do with the robots
when they are finally built.) The Junior version to the rescue task
is much simplified, with a robot following a line in the environment,
counting stick-figure `casualties' as it passes through.

Over the course of the afternoon Jie and Julian start competing in the
preliminary rounds. Julian starts reasonably confident, but then hits
some technical snags; Jie starts on a low ebb, but cheers up as his 2D
and 3D football teams start winning. Meanwhile just 100m away the
root/human dance performances begin, in which school teams dance with
robots of their own creation. The performances are all fascinating,
and of different styles; the one that the girls at Amberfield school
do to the new `St Trinians' song is especially hard to ignore! It's a
long day in the end, as we get back to the apartment around 10, and I
crash out again.