We are the champions!

In the Italian city of Padua, the rUNSWift team from the University of New South Wales regained their title of the world champion RoboCup Four-Legged League soccer team!

For those of you unfamiliar with the competition, RoboCup consists of a number of individual competitions that aim to test robot technologies in a competitive environment. The Four-Legged League involves teams of Sony Aibo ERS-210A (in 2003) robots that play soccer against each other! These robots are not remote controlled - the (human) teams must program them to behave appropriately, using its sensors (primarily its onboard camera) to observe the world and act accordingly. Quite a challenge!

My primary tasks as a member of this team were:

• Develop and implement solutions for two technical challenges
• Playing with a Black and White Ball (shoot a black-and-white ball into the goal)
• Localisation challenge (accurately move to several locations on the field without the aid of localisation beacons)
• Develop and implement a solution for the main game code for localising the robot from the field markings
• Particularly helpful for moving the ball up the sides of the field quickly without getting stuck!
  

My technical challenges came 5th and 1st in the world respectively! I'd also like to think that my contribution to the main game code also helped us in our 4-3 win against the University of Pennsylvania in the grand final!