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SickSack robotic snake slithers through RoboCup
Although DARwin looked to be a fine effort from the US of A, Aske Olsson and Lars Pontoppidan's entry relied on a more down-low approach to taking care of business. Their SickSack robotic snake chose to crawl rather than run, but the uniqueness of the creature's movement most definitely deserve props. Gearing up a series of rollers to blast across the raceway isn't all that impressive, but the SickSack's use of passive wheels combined with mechanics that enabled lateral undulation made this thing about as beastly as a metal-clad bot can get. It also featured eight Futaba servos, a microcontroller, and a good bit of wiring and programming for its locomotion, and it (rightfully) took home the award for best design / effects at RoboCup 2007. Click on through for the creepy crawly videos.[Via Lars' Electric Endeavors]
Team Osaka shows off RoboCup entrants
This year's RoboCup is still a few months away but entrants are already getting a chance to size up some of the competition, with Team Osaka unveiling its roster of players this week in Japan. As you can see in the videos on the site linked below, the bots are definitely built to impress, able to make diving saves and kick the ball better than many of their human counterparts, although they don't appear to have quite mastered the head-butt just yet. From the looks of it, the VisiON 4G robot will make up the majority of the team, with the larger Vstone810 bot apparently playing the role of enforcer. The bots aren't spending all their time on the pitch, however, with them also available to do your bidding at a cost of ¥1,000,000 or more (over $8,300) for the VisiON 4G and "several million" Yen for the Vstone810.[Via Impress]
DARwIn will be America's first humanoid RoboCup competitor
In a fitting tribute to the pioneering scientist after whom it was named, Virginia Tech's Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence (DARwIn) has finally "evolved" enough (it's now on the fourth iteration, DARwIn IIb) to compete in the traditional Japanese sport of robot soccer. The VT team -- composed of striker DARwIn IIa and goalie DARwIn I -- will reportedly be the first US competitors in the humanoid division of the popular RoboCup tournament, whose 2007 finals are actually being held right here on American soil in Atlanta. DIIa, the more sophisticated of the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory's (RoMeLa's) two bots, is built around a LabVIEW-powered 1.4GHz Pentium M with 1GB of RAM, 256KB of flash memory, 23 total actuators, a pair of FireWire cameras, and a gyroscope -- clearly the delicate head-mounted cam was designed before the head-butting ugliness of World Cup 2006. Keep reading to check out a vid of big D in action -- as well as tumbling over -- and then hit up the Read link for more pics, specs, and action-packed soccerbot clips.
Make's coverage of RoboGames 2006
Having already blown our entire travel budget attending CES, E3, and various other important events in sunny locations, we weren't able to scrape together the funds to hit up this year's annual RoboGames festival in San Francisco, but luckily Make magazine/blog has filled in the void by providing some excellent coverage. Formerly known as the ROBOlympics, the event has grown to over 20 categories and demonstrations, covering some of the same territory we saw at the Eastern Canadian Robot Games -- such as sumo wrestling, fire-fighting, and line-following -- but also throwing in a little RoboCup-style soccer football, a new 3-on-3 hockey tournament, and even a trio of so called Tetsujin events in which otherwise unathletic individuals sport hydraulic mech suits which enable them to perform amazing feats of speed, strength, and dexterity. Besides sponsoring a display table among the likes of Lego and NASA, Make also has its Media Maker Bre Pettis filing daily videocasts and flickr photosets from the scene, featuring such Engadget faves as Vstone's Robovie-M, Kondo's KHR-1, and HiTec's Robonova as well as several other non-competitive models like Mark Sherman's snakebot and a rig that can play and seemingly defeat children at Connect Four. You can follow the links below to get a feel for all the action, and stay tuned to Make because Day 3 coverage is only starting to trickle in.Read- RoboGames siteRead- Make @ RoboGamesRead- RoboGames Day 1Read- RoboGames Day 2
RoboCup underway in Germany
Human footballers aren't the only ones in Germany getting a little bit of lovin' this time of year. More than 400 teams from 36 countries have shown up for the annual RoboCup, which pits robot against robot in soccer matches across 11 leagues. The goal, as always, is to have a humanoid robot team capable of beating the human World Cup champs in 2050, but right now a lot of the robots are just happy to stand up. Current favorites in the humanoid competition is a team from Japan, while the returning champs from Germany are expected to do well in the four-legged league. Live commentary for some matches will be provided by Sango and Ami, two robots from Carnegie Mellon who explain rules, analyze fouls and call out the goals with their very own "personalities." No word if former star RoboVie-V will be making an appearance among the robot horde, but the real question is: can they dance like Peter Crouch?
Having mastered soccer, robots try football
One of the nice things about modern robotic competition is that once the competitors get too skilled at a given sport -- soccer, for instance -- you can simply toss a differently-shaped ball onto the field, and even the greatest RoboRonaldo is instantly knocked down a notch or two. Such is the case with Japan's Robot American Football Tournament, where the soccer ball of RoboCup-style tourneys has been replaced with a classic US pigskin (made out of rubber to liven things up), although NFL-type, turn-based play is eschewed for what usually degrades into a frenzied-but-exciting demolition derby. Teams of four bots each are controlled remotely by high school students during the six-minute games, where the goal is to score more "touchdowns" than one's opponents by shoveling the ball into the end zone. While this concept certainly makes for an entertaining spectacle, we'd like to see organizers from the All Japan Robot Sumo Tournament Office tweak the rules just a bit more, because instead of standing on the sidelines, the student operators should be strapped into huge, hydraulically-powered mecha and forced to use flame-throwers and nail-guns on one another if they want to emerge victorious on the playing field.
