1st RoboCup tournament in Greece

Wednesday, 5 May(15:00-16:30): The RoboCup tournament
Friday, 7 May (09:00-17:00): Humanoid Robots Demonstrations

SETN-2010 proudly hosted the first RoboCup tournament in Greece, featuring three teams competing in the Standard Platform League with Nao humanoid robots made by Aldebaran Robotics.

Photo from the RoboCup SPL demonstration at Athens Digital Week 2009

The RoboCup competition is the international robotic soccer world cup organized annually since 1997. It is probably the largest robotics event worldwide, as it brings together more than 3000 researchers from more than 40 countries and attracts tens of thousands of visitors. The initial conception by Hiroaki Kitano in 1993 led to the formation of the RoboCup Federation with a bold vision: "By the year 2050, to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champions"! The uniqueness of RoboCup stems from the real-world challenge it poses, whereby the core problems of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (perception, cognition, action, coordination) must be addressed simultaneously under real-time constraints. The proposed solutions are tested on a common benchmark environment through soccer games in various leagues, thus setting the stage for demonstrating and promoting the best research approaches, and ultimately advancing the state-of-the-art in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. RoboCup 2010 is taking place in Singapore in June.

Photo from the RoboCup SPL demonstration at Athens Digital Week 2009

The Standard Platform League (SPL) of the RoboCup competition is among the most popular leagues, featuring three Aldebaran Nao humanoid robot players in each team. The main characteristic of this league is that no hardware changes are allowed; all teams use the exact same robotic hardware and differ only in terms of their software. This convention results to the league's characterization by a unique combination of features: autonomous player operation, vision-based perception, legged locomotion and action. Given that the underlying robotic hardware is common for all competing teams, research efforts have focused on developing more efficient algorithms and techniques for visual perception, active localization, omnidirectional motion, skill learning, decision making, and coordination strategies.

The SPL tournament at SETN-2010 took place in the evening of May 5, 2010 and was carried out according to the official RoboCup rules for RoboCup 2010. The three competing teams were:

• Nao Team Humboldt
  Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
• Team S.P.Q.R.
  University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy
• Team Kouretes
  Technical University of Crete, Greece

Nao Team Humboldt was the winner of the tournament (see the official results at the bottom of the page)

The SPL tournament at SETN-2010 was complemented with an invited talk on "RoboCup: A Challenge Problem for Artificial Intelligence" delivered by Michail G. Lagoudakis. Lagoudakis is an assistant professor at the Technical University of Crete in Chania, Greece and leader of Team Kouretes, the first Hellenic RoboCup team participating in RoboCup competitions since 1996. In his talk he outlined the vision and contribution of the RoboCup competition and he offered an overview of Kouretes' research efforts in the context of RoboCup.

Final Results

Preliminary Round:
Kouretes - Humboldt: 0-2
Humboldt - SPQR : 1-2* (1-1)**
SPQR - Kouretes: 1-0 (0-0)

Ranking:
1. SPQR
2. Humboldt
3. Kouretes

Final:
SPQR - Humboldt: 0-1 (0-0)

Final Ranking:
1. Humboldt
2. SPQR
3. Kouretes

* Final score of the game
** The score after the standard game period (between parentheses)