4-4-2 turns into 0101: Robocup in Brazil

More recently, one of the most exciting events in the international sports calendar was completed in Brazil. But none of the coaches was fired, and the grass did not have to be watered, and, of course, nobody bit anyone.

This event was called Robocup , a tournament that sees the replacement of professional soccer players with robots. This is a regular tournament for national teams of experts in programming and robotics, which shows how rapidly this area is developing.

Robots play on much smaller fields, and they themselves are much smaller than real players. The arena is 6 by 9 meters in size and plays eleven 60 centimeters NAO robots.
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Competitions are held at slower speeds. Robots slowly go waddle and try to hit the ball. The ball itself does not rise into the air - as this can lead to serious malfunctions of the robot. Most likely this is due to the limited capabilities of these robots.

But from all this the game does not get boring. The arena was filled with people, both children and adults, who applauded every time when robo players faced the ball in the fight for the ball. And you can be sure that the robots play correctly, they can attack and defend like real players.

On either side of the gate, people sit behind laptops and monitor the status of robots. But they do not control them. They include robots when the match starts, but then the robots are completely autonomous.



Their autonomy is exactly what makes this football so unusual. They not only move around the field, but make decisions on their own. Their choice is based on what they see - the position of the ball, teammates and opponents.

The appearance of these robots is very deceptive. Under their plastic skins lurks the hard work of a team of programmers who have worked hard for many hours. Software for these robots is nowhere to be found and downloaded, it is done from scratch. And since a potentially infinite number of strategies can be used in football, the challenge for programmers is very difficult.



In essence, this whole RobotDuck is a confrontation of programming teams. They (programmers) literally in a few minutes in real time should select the necessary strategy depending on the course of the match.

In the finals of the standard league, Australia played 5-1 against Germany, winning the championship.
As you know, Germany won the human FIFA World Cup, but Australia overthrew this country in RoboCup 2014.

As a result, we can say that this direction of robotics and programming has great potential. If now we see sluggish and slightly “stupid” roboys, then in 10 years, perhaps the first Robonald will enter the field of Santiago Barnabeo and score a goal.



PS World Cyber ​​Championship in 2018 will be held in Russia, in Tomsk, on the basis of the University of TUSUR .

Info taken from Phys.org.
Translation and article prepared by the Telebreeze Team
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