Germans dominate Robot World Cup

It was an all-too-familiar result at the Robot World Cup as Britain crashed out in the group stage of a tournament that Germany dominated.

For the first time Britain was represented at the ‘RoboCup’, with a team sent from Edinburgh University.

The team competed in the Standard Platform League of the event in Istanbul which sees all teams use bipedal robots made by French firm Aldebaran Robotics.

However, it turned into an all-German final with a team called B-Human thrashing the Nao Devils 11-1 in the final to take the honours.

Dr Subramanian Ramamoorthy, assistant professor at the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University, said his team named ‘Edinferno’ suffered from a lack of pre-tournament practice.

“Almost all the bugs that stopped us were because we were not match ready,” he told the BBC.

“Until this year there was no British team. And we learned that our core technology is not that bad even though we have not been very successful.”

The tournament has been running since 1997 and was partially inspired by IBM’s famous Deep Blue Computer victory over chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov.

“We want to create robots that are intelligent enough to take care of themselves and to take care of anyone around them so they can be part of our lives,” said tournament organiser Dr Cetin Mericli.

As well as the standard platform competition, there were also four other leagues covering software-only simulated football as well as small, medium and humanoid teams of robots.

Mericli said that he could see a time when a team of robots would be able to beat the human World Cup winners.

“I think we could get there,” he said. “We can make robots that can win that game as all the pieces are here.

“However, if we did get there, the result would not be just about football. If you had robots that could win that game they would be useful for so many other things.”

via Germans dominate Robot World Cup – Yahoo! Eurosport UK.