U.S. RoboCup Soccer Team Grabs 2015 Championship
Originally posted in Yahoo.
You probably didn’t know that the United States has robot soccer teams. But in fact this week, just a handful of days after the USWNT took home the World Cup gold in Canada, our ladies’ America-repping humanoid counterparts won a title of their own at the 2015 RoboCup.
This champion red-white-and-blue team of fútbol bots — named THORwIn — was developed at the University of Pennsylvania. It beat out an Iranian-built squad 5-4 in the Wednesday “adult size” finals match in Hefei, China.
The
worldwide Robot Soccer World Cup (RoboCup for short) has been held
annually since 1997, with countries from all over the globe entering
robot teams of different sizes and shapes to compete in its various
sub-leagues. The robot players in RoboCup matches are required to be
autonomous, meaning they are not being controlled by humans during
gameplay.
A total of 175 robot teams from 47 different countries and regions took part in RoboCup 2015.
One
type of RoboCup match, called Standard Platform, forces each team to
use identically built humanoid robots. These unique rules make the
competition all about software AI programming, not actual robot
building. The 2015 Standard Platform champs were the UNSW Australia
bots, but American-made teams have topped this competition three times since 1999.
With
American women’s and robot soccer teams on a winning roll, all we need
now is for the men to catch up with some Cup gold of their own. Of
course, by the time they have their next chance at World Cup 2018, some
of our humanoid teams may have managed to squeeze in a three-peat or
two. So catching up could be tough.
Courtesy: Yahoo
