Knowledge News Portuguese Team wins Robot Soccer World Cup in China Portuguese Team wins Robot Soccer World Cup in China
- 22/07/2008
A team from the University of Aveiro yesterday became the Robot Football World Champions in the Middle Size League in the RoboCup2008 world championships which this year are being held in Suzhou, in China. A team from the Technological University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands, came in 2nd place and 3rd place was occupied by a team from the University of Osnabruek, Germany.
Altogether 23 teams from 8 different countries enrolled in this event, with 17 teams managing to quality and 13 actually taking part in the championship: 5 from China, 2 two teams from Germany, Iran and Japan, and 1 team from the Netherlands and from Portugal.
The team from the University of Aveiro, named CAMBADA (short for Cooperative Autonomous Mobile roBots with Advanced Distributed Architecture), won 9 of the 11 games in the three elimination rounds and qualified for the semi-finals where the team faced the University of Stuttgart, from Germany, beating them 4-3. In the final the Portugal team defeated the team from the Technological University of Eindhoven, from the Netherlands, by 7 goals to 1.
The CAMBADA team officially started competing in October 2003 as an initiative of the research institute IEETA – Aveiro Institute for Electronic and Telematic Engineering. Prior to this event, the team had taken part in three RoboCup championships (2004, 2006 and 2007), in the Dutch Open of 2006 and in the Portuguese Robotics Open (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008), in which they came in 1st place in 2007 and 2008. In the 2007 RoboCup they came in 5th place.
The Middle Size League for Robot Football consists of teams of up to 6 robots which cannot exceed 50 cm in diameter and which play with an orange-coloured ball in a court which is 18 m by 12 m. All the sensors have to be mounted on the autonomously operating robots and they may communicate wirelessly. Each game consists of two 15 minute halves.
Altogether, with all the different events, there were around 400 teams from 34 countries/regions which took part in the Robo Cup of 2008: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, , Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the United States of America.
The RoboCup tournament is an international initiative for research and education. Its aim is to develop research into artificial and robotic intelligence through setting a standardised problem and then examining and bringing together a wide range of technologies to solve it. The idea of robots playing football was introduced in 1993 and the first games were held in Nagoya, Japan, in 1997. Portugal hosted the games in Lisbon in 2004, as the result of a successful bid to host the games which was made in 2001. These games were followed by other tournaments in Paris, Stockholm, Melbourne, Seattle, Fukuoka/Busan, Padua, Lisbon, Osaka, Bremen and Atlanta.
Part of a match for qualifying can be seen here on YouTube: CAMBADA's qualification for the RoboCup2008, and also a description of the team. It is also possible to consult the references to the academic articles published by the team.
Seen from a match yesterday in the Middle Size League of Robotic Football in the RobotCup2008, held in Suzhou, China:
Photography of the CAMBADA team from IEETA, of the University of Aveiro, at the RoboCup2008, in Suzhou, China,
with the trophy for the Middle Size League of the Robotic Football World Championship: