Download here: http://www.robotspodcast.com/podcast/mp3/robots-20080704-episode3.mp3
Robot Soccer
To close this year's soccer season after Spain's victory in the EUROCUP we went to the robotic kingdom to see who was driving the game. With Prof. Manuela Veloso from Carnegie Mellon University and President-Elect of the International RoboCup Federation, we'll be looking behind the scene of the best known competition in robot soccer. Finally, we'll be discussing the future with a poll on the future of artificial dribblers and their odds against the human 2050 world champions.
Manuela Veloso
Manuela Veloso is Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, President-Elect of the International RoboCup Federation and leader of the Coral Research Group (Cooperate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn). Since the first official Robocup soccer games in 1997, she's been active in presenting teams to the Sony AIBO 4-legged league, the smallsize league, simulation league and Segway league with a great success at adding stars to the shirts of her robotics players with numerous first places in world and US championships.
In this episode we'll be focusing on the CMDragon's team cookie-box wheeled robots of the small size league and their offboard perception.
We'll also be looking at how the CMDash team has tamed the AIBO robot dogs to perceive their world and cooperate in a decentralized manner, with an emphasize on the challenges related to competing against different opponents and need for the teams to adapt during the games.
Since the AIBOs are no longer produced, the RoboCup org is now making way for the Nao humanoid as the next challenging platform in robot soccer along with other research driving leagues such as the Nano-gram league previously features in Talking Robots (see Brad Nelson's interview).
Links:
Manuela Veloso's Homepage: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv/
Robocup: http://www.robocup.org/
The Coral Research Group: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral
cheers
adam