Soccer robots gather for world cup

8 July 2011 Last updated at 07:37 GMT The University of Edinburgh's Subramanian Ramamoorthy is training robots to play football

The best strikers, defenders and midfield players in the robot football world are gathering in Istanbul.

The teams and their coaches are there for the climax of the 2011 non-human soccer calendar - the RoboCup.

The competition sees teams from all around the world pit their creations, be they made from bolts or bytes, against other robot teams.

The 2011 tournament includes one of the UK's first robot football teams.

Team human

Now in its 14th year, the RoboCup was set up with the aim of creating, by 2050, a team of humanoid robots that can take on and beat the best human players.

The competition aims to encourage innovation in robot building by getting roboteers to tackle the many problems that playing football embodies.

Not only do team coaches have to conquer basic problems such as vision, but they also have to work on how to get their players acting as a team. All robots playing the game have to be autonomous - although the machines can swap information wirelessly. Play must also be fair as no barging, blocking or touching is allowed.

UK team Edinferno from the University of Edinburgh has won a place in the final and is up against 27 other teams in what is known as the "standard platform" league.

The RoboCup attracts teams from more than 40 nations

Every team in this league uses humanoid Nao robots made by French firm Aldebaran Robotics. The robots are standard but the on-board software controlling their sensors, actuators and limbs is custom-written to try to make the best of the machine's capabilities.

The UK also has an interest in the Noxious Kouretes team that is coached by the Technical University of Crete as well as the University of Wales and Oxford University.

In addition, a number of UK schools have qualified for the junior competition.

Other leagues at the tournament will see competition among simulated players (both 2D and 3D), small robots, medium-sized robots and teams made of humanoid robots.

In 2010, about 500 teams from about 40 nations - including Iran, Taiwan and Chile - took part in the RoboCup's various tournaments.

In recent years, the tournament has grown to include more than just football. Allied competitions cover domestic robots that carry out chores around the house and rescue robots that help emergency services.

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Robots develop their own language

24 May 2011 Last updated at 09:32 GMT The robots play word games to learn and test their geographic knowledge Robots are developing their own language to help them navigate and improve their intellectual ability.

The Lingodroid research project lets robots generate random sounds for the places they visit in both simulations and a real office.

The "words" are shared and the robots play games to establish which sound represents which location.

The lexicon has proved so sophisticated that it can be used to help robots find places other robots direct them to.

The machines are being allowed to generate their own words because human language is so loaded with information that robots found it hard to understand, said project leader Dr Ruth Schulz from the University of Queensland.

"Robot-robot languages take the human out of the loop," she said. "This is important because the robots demonstrate that they understand the meaning of the words they invent independent of humans."

Robots engaging in a location language game. Courtesy of the University of Queensland.

One set of the trials with Lingodroids sees wheeled robots fitted with a camera, laser-range finder, and sonar used to map their world - roaming around at an office at the University. The robots also have a microphone and speakers onboard so they can communicate with each other.

The wheeled robots travel about and, when they reach a place that does not have a name, they generate a random combination of syllables that represent that place.

When that robot meets another robot it tells it about the places it has been. Slowly, as the robots travel and talk, they narrow down their lexicon of place names until a mutual gazeteer of their world has been generated.

The robots generated place names such as "kuzo", "jaro" and "fexo".

Each location was broadly tied to the sensory horizon of the sonar and laser-range finder they have on board, said Dr Schulz. Each chunk of territory was typically a couple of metres in diameter, she said.

The names the robots generate map to places they have been or have been told about.

This enabled the names to be used as rough distance measures and allowed the robots to play other games which communicate distance, travel time and direction.

Some games involve swapping sounds but others, such as the "go-to-game" involve the robots trying to meet up at a distant location.

The power of the language being created by the Lingodroids was starting to become apparent, said Dr Schulz.

"They enable the robots to refer to places they haven't been or even places that they imagine beyond the edges of their explored world," she said.

Dr Schulz said work was continuing to enable the robots to generate and understand more place names and make their appreciation of their geography more subtle.

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