The RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition with the aim of promoting robotics and AI research, by offering a publicly appealing, but formidable challenge.
In more general, RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal to advance the state of the art of intelligent robots. When established in 1997, the original mission was to field a team of robots capable of winning against the human soccer World Cup champions by 2050. While that mission remains, RoboCup has since expanded into other relevant application domains based on the needs of modern society. Today, RoboCup covers the following themes:
RoboCupSoccer
creating teams of fully autonomous, cooperative robots that exhibit advanced competitive behaviors and strategies;
RoboCupRescue
assisting emergency responders to save people and perform hazardous tasks with highly mobile, dexterous and semi-autonomous robots capable of mapping and negotiating complex environments;
RoboCup@Home
helping people in their daily lives at home and in public with autonomous and naturally interactive assistant robots;
RoboCupJunior
motivating young people to learn skills and knowledge necessary in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as well as to foster their soft skills through participating in the creative process of building and programming autonomous robots.
In April 2015 Rescube Robotics participated at the Rescue Robots league of the RoboCup German Open 2015. As a first-timer team in a very tough competition our goal was just to get a taste of a large international contest. In overall and much to our surprise we have ranked
6th in the main league
2nd in the “Best in class: manipulation” subcontest
Some technical details of our robot:
4 wheel differential drive, shape transforming body
two onboard computers running Linux with ROS Indigo with high speed wireless networking
structure.io depth camera, three high framerate cameras
laser scanner (lidar) and a thermal imaging camera
gimbal-stabilized sensor head
several inertial sensor arrays
Read more about the 2016 preparation and our new robot in our blog!